Household Saving in the '90s: Evidence from Cross-Section Wealth Surveys: Technical Paper 1999-3

This paper uses a series of cross-section wealth surveys to measure how wealth accumulation and active saving rates varied across cohort-groups during the early and mid 1990s. Our estimated rates of saving and wealth change across cohorts show a somewhat more dramatic life cycle pattern than found in previous studies, in part because we use a new technique, and in part because the cross-section wealth surveys we use oversample the wealthiest families whose behavior dominates aggregate changes. Adjusting the wealth-change rates for bequests and subtracting out the capital gains component of