This paper investigates the effects of increased cash dividend payout, and of quot;forced realizations~ of capital gains in corporate control transactions, on the level of aggregate consumption. The results support the proposition that investors respond differently to cash receipts from firms...

Foreign-owned manufacturing firms' shares of U.S. trade grew from almost nothing in the 1960s to 7 or 8 per cent of trade in manufactured goods by the 1980s. It has changed little in the past decade, except for fluctuations related to changing U.S. exchange rates. Foreign-owned firms are less...

This paper presents new evidence on the importance of adverse selection in insurance markets. We use a unique data set, consisting of all annuity policies sold by a large U.K. insurance company since the early 1980s, to analyze mortality differences across groups of individuals who purchased...

This paper tests several competing hypotheses about the economic effects of dividend taxation. It employs British data on security returns, dividend payout rates, and corporate investment, because unlike the United States, Britain has experienced several major dividend tax reforms in the last...

This paper shows how models of insurance markets with asymmetric information can be calibrated and solved to yield quantitative estimates of the consequences of government regulation. We estimate the impact of restricting gender-based pricing in the United Kingdom retirement annuity market, a...

We explore four issues concerning annuitization options that retirees might use in the decumulation phase of an individual accounts' retirement saving system. First, we investigate the operation of both real and nominal annuity individual annuity markets in the United Kingdom. The widespread...

A long tradition in international economics explains comparative advantage by differences between countries in their stage of development, or their endowments of land, labor, and capital, and suggests that universal development will reduce the importance of trade. Sweden and the United States...

The international investment account of the United States has gone through several cycles. Before World War I, the U.S. was a borrower most of the time and an international debtor. Between the two World Wars, it was first a lender and then a refuge for foreign capital. After World War 11, the...

The standard measures of nominal capital formation show the United States investing a proportion of GDP much lower than those of other developed countries throughout the last 25 years and falling further behind over time. In contrast, measures we have calculated in real terms across countries...

This paper explores the relationship between household marginal income tax rates, the set of assets that households own, and the portfolio shares accounted for by each of these assets. It analyzes data from the 1983, 1989, 1992, and 1995 Surveys of Consumer Finances and develops a new algorithm...