Data suggest that the distribution of wealth among households in the USA and UK has become more equal over the last century, though, at least for the USA, the pattern may have reversed recently. This paper shows that a model in which all households save for life-cycle reasons and some for...

Using a life-cycle model in which women divide their time between home and market work, we establish a link between retirement wealth and the value of forgone home production. We use data from the Health and Retirement Study to estimate the model's parameters and adjust the growth rate of GDP to...

Economists’ standard model assumes that improvements in total factor productivity (TFP) raise the marginal product of labor for all workers evenly. This paper uses an earnings dynamics regression model to study whether, in practice, older workers benefit less from TFP growth than younger...

We introduce a tractable model of post-retirement saving behavior in which households have a precautionary motive arising from uninsured health status risks. The model distinguishes between annuitized and non-annuitized wealth, emphasizes the importance of asset composition in determining...

The evidence continues to mount. As our industrial economy continues to dump large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, we are affecting the atmospheric chemistry of the global climate. This has led prominent physicist and climate scientist James Hansen to reach the “startling conclusion”...

Robert Lucas's recent paper on supply-side economics (1990) finds a large welfare loss from taxation of interest income in the U.S. economy. The present work extends the analysis of steady-state equilibria to cover the transition paths that accompany tax reform. Calculations then show a 25...

Over the last fifty years, home production output may have changed significantly due to dramatic increases in women's time allocation to market work. It is important to quantify this change: to the extent that increases in GDP derive from new time allocation patterns, failure to measure...

Empirical evidence suggests that the poor spend a larger fraction of their income on gambling than the well-to-do. This paper shows that "means tests" for public-assistance eligibility could supply part of the explanation. Income support programs can distort private budget sets, conceivably...

This paper investigates the role in household wealth accumulation of saving for bequests. It employs data from a 1988 survey of TIAA-CREF annuitants designed to measure pension and other net worth as well as lifetime earnings. About half of the households in the data plan to leave estates and...