The American Dream Demonstration, the largest collection of individual development account programs ever undertaken in the United States, has encouraging evidence that the poor can save. Could this be the future of asset development?

What are asset-development policies? What programs are underway to explore such policies? Larry Beeferman of the Asset Development Institute describes the movement and his views on why asset-development policies are vital to economic equality.

Psychological evidence indicates that a person's well-being depends not only on his current consumption of goods, but on a reference level determined by his past consumption. According to Kahneman and Tversky's (1979) prospect theory, people care much more about losses relative to their...

The economics literature offers competing hypotheses about the relationship between savings rates and output variability. This paper examines data for eight industrial countries to determine if there is a discernible pattern between savings rates and cyclical volatility of output. We find a...

Leonard Nakamura examines this paradox of low savings accompanied by increased wealth.

In this paper, we conduct a dynamic panel analysis of the determinants of the household saving rate in China using a life cycle model and panel data on Chinese provinces for the 1995-2004 period from China's household survey. We find that China's household saving rate has been high and rising...

We consider an environment in which individuals receive income shocks that are unobservable to others and can privately store resources. We provide a simple characterization of the efficient allocation in cases in which the rate of return on storage is sufficiently high or, alternatively, in...

Looking to buy homes in Boston and learn about financial management, almost 200 people have joined "The Network," an intensive IDA program that is entering its second session. Kathleen Gill profiles the IDA.