This paper examines the relationship between the growth rates of household saving, public saving, corporate saving and economic growth in India using multivariate Granger causality tests. The conventional wisdom suggests that the causality flows from saving to economic growth. We show that the...

There is a consolidated empirical literature providing evidence of the fact that financial literacy, human capital, savings and stock market participation are interconnected decisions. However, to the best of our knowledge, a theoretical explanation of such connections is missing. In this paper...

Self-esteem measures confidence in one’s abilities. Prior literature has shown that higher self-esteem can also affect individual financial decision making through an increased willingness to invest in risky assets and motivation to enhance self image through wealth accumulation. However,...

This article presents a practical methodology to monitor poverty changes among microfinance clients using available household panel data. As an example, it presents an estimation of the net number of people that rose above the $1/day poverty line while members of Grameen Bank and BRAC during...

In the 2001 U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), 27% of households report simultaneously revolving significant credit card debt and holding sizeable amounts of liquid assets. These consumers report paying, on average, a 14% interest rate on their debt, while earning only 1 or 2% on their...

What matters to economic decision-making is whether the economy has become more or less predictable. People and businesses use information around them to form judgements about what might happen in the future. The rise in uncertainty might be associated with increased concern about extreme...

We reexamine the empirical relevance of habit formation preferences with micro-data on households' portfolio choices. We first derive the analytical solution to the risky asset share in a theoretical model with both habits and time-varying labor income. Our analytical results indicate that (1)...

We estimate the long-run discount factor for a group of developed and developing countries through standard methodology incorporating adaptive expectations of inflation. We find that the discount factor of developing countries is relatively nearer to unity as compared to that of the developed...

Two key components of the upcoming health reform in the U.S. are a new regulation of the individual health insurance market and an increase in income redistribution in the economy. Which component contributes more to the welfare outcome of the reform? We address this question by constructing a...