The ultimate burden of a sales tax on intermediate products is traces to final consumers through input-output relationships. The main effect of accounting for the burden of taxes levied on intermediate products is to move the overall distributional effect of a sales tax more toward...

We show in a simple model that households will choose 401(k) loans over other consumer loans if the opportunity cost of 401(k) loans — i.e., the foregone asset returns — is less than the cost of other loans, and that few households would carry high-cost consumer debt without first utilizing...

We study firms' pension prefunding and portfolio allocation choices in a model in which firms trade off the need to compensate workers for the financial risk in their pension benefit against the cost advantage that may be gained by exploiting underpriced pension insurance. In the absence of...

In this paper, we develop a measure of household resources that converts total financial and non-financial assets, plus annuity-like assets (mainly, Social Security and defined-benefit pensions) into an expected annual amount of wealth per person in retirement. We use this measure, which we call...