This paper evaluates research examining the effects of tax-based saving incentives on private and national saving. Several" factors make this an unusually difficult problem. First, households that participate in, or are eligible for, saving incentive plans have systematically stronger tastes for...

This paper examines the effects of Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) on private and national saving. We construct a formal model of dynamic utility maximization that generates closed-form equations for IRA and other saving. Our empirical estimates indicate that raising the annual IRA...

American saving rates fell dramatically in the 1980s and have remained low since then. The decline in saving has raised concerns that the economy may be unable to finance investment and sustain growth and that households may not be saving adequately for retirement. One response to these concerns...