Ricerche Economiche最新文献

Heterogeneity in individual saving behaviour presents the major difficulty in determining the saving effect of special retirement saving programs. We address that issue in this paper by “using individuals as their own controls”. The paper considers changes in other saving when individuals made contributions to Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) near the outset of that program. The analysis is based on the 1984 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). For the most part, we find that when individuals who were not contributing to an IRA began to contribute there was little change in other saving.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between household saving and the distribution of income within the household. Various theoretical reasons why the level of saving might depend on the latter are given. Some of these can be rationalized within the usual “unitary” model of household decision but others recognize explicitly that different members of the household may have different preferences about how much to save.

Particular attention is paid to saving for retirement since the facts that wives are, on average, younger than their husbands and women have longer life expectancies means that wives typically anticipate a longer retirement period than their husbands. Thus wives may prefer to save more for retirement than their husbands.

The empirical analysis uses a sample of Canadian households from five Family Expenditure Surveys. These surveys include measures of financial saving as well saving in retirement accounts. After accounting for many of the other influences on saving (for example: age, household composition, occupation and education levels but not household income) we find some effects of the intra-household distribution of income on savings rates. The parameter estimates suggest that the household saving rate decreases with the share of the wife in household income.

As the public pay-as-you-go pension systems of the ageing industrialized countries are likely to become seriously strained under the growing dependency burden, the question arises whether a society should rely on private savings to finance old-age consumption. This is an empirical question about the magnitude and the flexibility of saving rates. This paper argues that saving rates must increase in an unprecedented fashion in order to compensate for the dependency effect.

The paper takes the German case as an example. It analyses saving behaviour in Germany using three waves of the Income and Expenditure Survey. It separates age and cohort effects; computes the demographics induced change in the aggregate saving rate; and compares the magnitude of these excess savings with the increasing burden of the pension system. Finally, a macroeconomic simulation model is used to explore possible paths of the cohort effects in saving rates.

Using panel data for the Netherlands, we find that wealth holdings of the elderly are very unevenly distributed. Furthermore, the inequality increases with age, which indicates different rates of accumulation (or decumulation) across wealth levels. This divergence in behaviour depending on wealth holdings points to a strong bequest motive. The presence of a bequest motive is confirmed by subjective information obtained from a new and unique panel, the VSB-panel, that we exploit. For most elderly the level of assets is so low that it probably mainly serves to satisfy a precautionary motive. Subjective information in the VSB-panel shows that precautionary motives are indeed quite strong among the elderly. For the vast majority of the elderly social security and pensions are absolutely essential to maintain a decent standard of living.

This paper examines age profiles of consumption and income from 25 successive years of the U.K. Family Expenditure Survey, looking in particular at households as they retire. We break down income and expenditure data for different cohorts and assess how they change over the life-cycle and around the time of their retirement. We then compare periods of unemployment and retirement and separate expenditures into some broad categories. Using stochastic Euler conditions we assess the anticipated impact of retirement against that of unemployment. It emerges that although income typically falls by more at unemployment than retirement the reverse is true for expenditure. Since the Euler equation results point to each having similar anticipated effects on consumption, the only way in which the life-cycle hypothesis (LCH) could be reconciled with this would be with the arrival of new information at the time of retirement.

A dynamic model of the demographic structure of Japan is summarized. It is capable of tracing the dynamic development of the Japanese population, including the distribution of families by age, sex, and marital status of the head, as well as by the number and age of children and other dependents. This model is combined with specification of the processes generating family income and consumption, and then used to generate the pattern of aggregate income, saving and asset accumulation for the period 1985–2050 under alternative fertility assumptions. The results suggest that the saving-income ratio for Japan will increase slightly in the immediate future as the number of children per family declines sharply, and then falls moderately as the proportion of older persons in the population increases. Qualitative results depend critically on the labour force participation rate of older persons and on the probability of older persons merging into younger households.

A complete set of definitions of scarcity and some theorems on the relationship between competitive prices and scarcity of commodities are introduced. Competitive prices do not always represent signals of scarcity. Anyway under the hypothesis of monotonic preferences scarce commodities have positive prices, and when all commodities are both normal and gross substitutes, prices are indices of relative scarcity. Consequently, the connection between scarcity and prices is not an absolute foundation of economic theory.