We study the life cycle of portfolio allocation following for 15 years a large random sample of Norwegian households using error-free data on all components of households' investments drawn from the Tax Registry. Both, participation in the stock market and the portfolio share in stocks, have...

A number of European countries changed their tax system in the early 1990s along the lines of the US tax reform act of 1986. After the reforms marginal tax rates were generally lower, and mortgage interest deductions less generous. At the same time a long period of house appreciation started in...

This paper presents evidence on household savings in urban regions of the Chinese provinces Sichuan and Liaoning based on data from the State Statistical Bureau's Urban Household Survey for the late 1980s. In this period the Chinese economy was subject to extensive reforms that resulted in rapid...

I use new micro data to study the effects of credit deregulation on the Norwegian household savings decline in the mid-1980s. This paper has three main findings. First, the decline in saving started in 1983, a couple of years earlier than previously thought on the basis of National Accounts...

A precautionary saving model is extended to include old-age pensions and provides the framework for an empirical analysis of the relation between old-age pensions and private consumption. Norwegian macro-data for socioeconomic groups of households are used to estimate consumption functions for...

Are there generational differences in saving behavior? On the basis of new micro data for household saving in Norway I find that differences between birth cohorts are small and statistically insignificant. In particular, cohort effects are small compared to the strong positive effect of aging on...

The present paper uses the model by Campbell and Mankiw (1991) to examine the Norwegian consumer behavior and the role of the financial deregulation during the 1980s. For quarterly data on non-durables and services, we estimate the fraction of current income consumers to be in the range of 37%...

Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-section data, we may confuse older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates transitory...

An important problem in the analysis of intertemporal choice processes is how to justify the choice of mathematical structure of the transition probabilities. A related and delicate identification problem is to separate the effect of unobserved variables from the influence on preferences from...

Structural models of lifetime labour supply and consumption require functional specifications of preferences as well as other assumptions that can be difficult to assess a priori. Misspecifications of the model might lead to biases in the estimates of preferences, that may influence the...