Japanese and U.S. saving rates have been significantly different over the last forty years. Can a standard growth model explain this difference? The answer is yes. Our results indicate that both an infinite horizon, complete markets setup and an overlapping generations model with incomplete...

In this paper we study the welfare effects of eliminating social security in a model with two sided altruism where social security provides insurance against lifetime and individual income uncertainty. Our findings indicate that households are able to shift the efficiency gains, generated...