The authors evaluate research on how tax-based saving incentives (IRAs and 401(k)s) affect saving. Previous research overstates the impact of the incentives on saving by failing to account for several issues: households with saving incentives have stronger tastes for saving than others; saving...

We examine a model that generalizes the standard buffer-stock model of savings to accommodate durables, nondurables and a collateralized liquidity constraint, with and without adjustment costs in the durables market. Since there is no known analytical solution to the model, we solve it...

This paper investigates the quantitative importance of different savings motives on the distributions of wealth and consumption and aggregate capital accumulation by solving an overlapping generations model with intragenerational heterogeneity. Agents differ in age, ability, earnings shocks, and...

This paper studies competitive equilibria of a production economy with aggregate productivity shocks and with a continuum of consumers subject to borrowing constraints and individual labor endowment shocks. The dynamic economy is described in terms of sequences of aggregate distributions. The...

This paper explores whether habit formation in the representative agent’s preferences can explain two failures of the standard permanent income model: the sensitivity to lagged consumer sentiment, and to predictable changes in income. I show that in a habit formation model, the sensitivity of...

Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime? We answer this question within a model that features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital, estimated directly from data, as well as...

We study the Ramsey (1928) model under the assumption that households act strategically. We compute the Markov perfect equilib- rium for this model and compare it to the original, competitive equi- librium and to a strategic open-loop equilibrium proposed by Sorger (2002, 2005b). We show that,...

Appendix to the main text

This paper attempts to provide an answer as to why the level of average per capita consumer expenditure, the asset possession or, more prosaically, the apparent level of living in some Indian states are comparatively higher than in states which have yet a higher level of income as measured by...

In this paper we analyze the relationship between unemployment and consumption. We study this relationship with panel data on households in five countries. Our empirical relsuts indicate that an increase in the duration of unemployment spells of male household heads is associated with smaller...