The purpose of the present study is to measure the extent to which an increase in the total capital stock induces an increase in the stock of residential capital, i.e., to measure the marginal propensity of additional capital to be absorbed in residential capital. A knowledge of this propensity...

The evidence presented in this paper indicates that changes in government spending, transfers and taxes can have substantial effects on aggregate demand. The estimates also indicate that the promise of future social security benefits significantly reduces private saving. Each of the basic...

This paper discusses how private pension programs differ from public social security in their likely impact on aggregate saving. Although private pensions are likely to reduce direct saving by employees, this should be offset by the combination of companies' partial funding and the shareholders...

This paper shows how the interaction of tax rules and expected inflation can decrease substantially the share price per dollar of pretax earnings. The current analysis extends my earlier study [Feldstein (1978)] by recognizing corporate debt, retained earnings, and the role of diverse...

With the existing "historic cost" method of depreciation, higher inflation rates reduce the real value of future depreciation deductions and therefore raise the real net cost of investment. The calculations in this paper show that this rise in the net cost can be quite substantial at recent...

The U.S. Social Security Administration, in cooperation with similar agencies in other countries, recently developed estimates of social security benefits for twelve major industrial countries. The present paper uses these data to estimate the effects of social security benefits on saving and...

This paper, which was presented as the 1979 Frank Paish Lecture to the British Association of University Teachers of Economics, provides a non-technical summary of the recent studies of the effects of social security on private saving. The first section discusses the theoretical indeterminacy of...

This paper reviews the studies by Robert Barro, Michael Darby, and Alicia Munnell, as well as my own earlier time-series study and presents new estimates using the revised national income-account data. The basic estimates of each of the four studies point to an economically substantial effect...

Traditional theory implies that the relative price of consumer goods and of such real assets as land and gold should not be permanently affected by the rate of inflation. A change in the general rate of inflation should, in equilibrium, cause an equal change in the rate of inflation for each...

This paper discusses a crucial cause of the failure of share prices to rise during a decade of substantial inflation. Indeed, the share value per dollar of pretax earnings actually fell from 10.82 in 1967 to 6.65 in 1976. The analysis here indicates that this inverse relation between higher...