Testing the Saving-Investment correlations in India: An evidence from single-equation and system estimators

This study tests the Saving-Investment correlations in India using both single-equation and system estimators. All the estimators suggest the cointegrating relationship between saving and investment, and the results are robust to the choice of estimator. The conventional and new CUSUM tests show long-run stability of equilibrium residuals and reinforce the cointegrating relationship between the model series. The slope parameter on saving is significantly different from zero, but not from one. These results support the FH hypothesis and suggest the imperfect mobility of capital and home-bias in the asset portfolio of domestic investors. The heavy reliance of investment on domestic saving also reinforces the ‘Lucas Puzzle’ on the lack of capital flows from the developed countries to the developing countries with scare capital and higher marginal product of capital.     

Wealth and the capitalist spirit

The wealth distribution in the U.S. is more unequal than either the income or earnings distribution, a fact current models of saving behavior have difficulty explaining. Using Max Weber’s [Weber, M. (1905). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Charles Scribners’ and Sons (1958 translated edition)] idea that individuals may have a ‘capitalist spirit’, I construct and simulate a model where individuals accumulate wealth for its own sake rather than as deferred consumption. Including capitalist spirit preferences in a simple life cycle model, with no other modifications, generates a skewness of wealth consistent with that observed in the U.S. economy. Furthermore, capitalist spirit preferences provide a way to generate decreasing risk aversion with increases in wealth without resorting to idiosyncratic rates of time preference.     

HOUSEHOLD AND ENTERPRISE SAVING AND CAPITAL FORMATION IN THE UNITED STATES: A MARKET TRANSACTIONS VIEW

Contrary to conventional macro theory, it is not the consumption function in terms of either the permanent income or the life-cycle theory of saving that has furnished the saving for enterprise capital formation in the United States. Household sector accounts indicate that household gross saving, correctly measured, did not exceed household gross capital formation in the United States over the period since 1947. Furthermore, historical data on enterprise saving and capital formation in the United States, and cross-section tax return data of U.S. corporations indicate that the gross saving for many enterprise sectors has been equal to or greater than their gross capital formation. There are exceptions, however: these same sources indicate that public utilities have borrowed substantially to finance their capital formation. Finally, it is argued that employer pension and insurance reserves held by financial institutions for future benefit payments represent retained income of a nature similar to undistributed profits, and that these constitute a source of saving in the economy.     

Growth and employment differentials under alternative wage-setting institutions and integrated capital markets

This paper compares the effects of different labor market institutions on economic growth and employment. In the general equilibrium model here presented, a mechanism causing persistence (on-the-job training) interacts with the strategic complementary between investors’ decisions on capital accumulation and workers’ decisions on labor-market participation. Within this framework (i) structurally and institutionally similar economies preserve forever their differences in output and employment levels, (ii) the steady-state growth rate is higher in an economy with competitive wage determination than in an unionized economy, (iii) this growth differential enlarges when the product and the capital markets of these two economies are integrated.     

Modeling internal commitment mechanisms and self-control: A neuroeconomics approach to consumption–saving decisions

We provide a new model of consumption–saving decisions which explicitly allows for internal commitment mechanisms and self-control. Agents have the ability to invoke either automatic processes that are susceptible to the temptation of ‘over-consuming,’ or alternative control processes which require internal commitment but are immune to such temptations. Standard models in behavioral economics ignore such internal commitment mechanisms. We justify our model by showing that much of its construction is consistent with dynamic choice and cognitive control as they are understood in cognitive neuroscience.The dynamic consumption–saving behavior of an agent in the model is characterized by a simple consumption–saving goal and a cut-off rule for invoking control processes to inhibit automatic processes and implement the goal. We discuss empirical tests of our model with available individual consumption data and we suggest critical tests with brain-imaging and experimental data.     

A MODEL OF GENERAL TRAINING, BANKING, AND LABOR TURNOVER

Conventionally, models of general training assume perfect capital markets; as a result, workers smooth their consumption stream through borrowing. In these models general training has no effect on labor turnover. I develop a model of general training where workers have diminishing marginal utility from consumption, capital markets are imperfect, and a firm cannot monitor the match quality with another firm of a worker who quits. It is shown that in the absence of a surplus effect from training, raising the level of general training steepens the worker's wage profile for reasons associated with consumption smoothing and labor turnover. However, with the surplus effect, results may be ambiguous.     

Entrepreneurs' capital accumulation behavior and long-run equilibrium

The purpose of this paper is to derive some interesting results on long-run equilibrium by considering entrepreneurs' capital accumulation behavior explicitly. Our framework is a two class, two production sector model in order to analyze the dynamic stability properties in the cases of Kaldor's saving assumption and Pasinetti's saving assumption. We shall introduce a further adjustment mechanism: the speeding up (slowing down) of capital accumulation in that sector in which the rate of profit is higher (lower).     

Aspects of optimal unemployment insurance : Search, leisure, savings and capital market imperfections

Unemployment insurance is analysed in the optimal taxation framework. Benefits discourage search and thus raise unemployment. A perfect capital market model is developed and solved explicitly for a constant absolute risk aversion utility function. For ‘realistic’ parameter values low replacement rates (less than 50%) are optimal. If there is no lending or borrowing the optimal rates rise to about 75%. Alternative models also admit leisure as a good and the input to search; this reduces optimal replacement when the capital market is perfect. When it is nonexistent the optimal benefits depend on the value of leisure - rising as it falls. Alternatives to constant benefits conditional on continued unemployment are considered.     

Corporate taxation,retained earnings,and capital formation

How retained corporate profits affect capital formation is the subject of the paper. A distributed-lag model is set up to relate corporate saving to household consumption, rather than saving, because of deficiencies in saving data. Alternative equations, estimated from aggregate U.S. data for 1948-74, strongly suggest that undistributed corporate profits have no independent influence on consumption. Their effect, if any, works via expected capital gains which are treated as a component of wealth by households in making spending decisions. Implications of these results for tax policy, especially for integrating personal and corporate taxation, are also discussed.     

The effect of labor market monopsony on economic growth

In this endogenous growth model, a minimum efficient scale of production and workers’ home-to-work travel costs combine to give firms monopsony power, and this monopsony power leads to slower growth. Monopsony drives the wage below the marginal product of labor. This lower wage leads to lower investment in human capital and thereby to a lower growth rate. This makes investment in human capital – and therefore the growth rate – suboptimal. We provide evidence from a cross-country panel to support our model: Urbanization, which we assume is determined by a country’s exogenous population density and cropland area, positively impacts the wage share of output; the wage share positively impacts educational attainment; higher-income countries have higher wage shares; and within-country upticks in the wage share have a positive lagged effect on the growth rate.     

The Socially Optimal Level of Saving in Australia, 1960-61 to 1994-95

In this paper a model is developed which determines the socially optimal level of saving for a small open economy. The model also determines the socially optimal disposition of saving between domestic capital accumulation and overseas asset accumulation. The model is then applied to the Australian economy for the period 1960-61 to 1994-95. For each year of that period socially optimal levels of saving, investment and the current account of the balance of payments are determined. Two main conclusions emerge. Firstly, while Australia under-saved by an average of 1.7 per cent of GDP from 1974-75 to 1994-95, it over-saved by an average of 5.3 per cent of GDP in the earlier period from 1960-61 to 1973-74. Secondly, Australia did not make optimal use of world capital markets to smooth consumption in the period from 1960-61 to 1994-95; although there is less evidence for this since 1984-85, suggesting that deregulation of capital markets may have facilitated the optimal smoothing of consumption.     

Mortality,Human Capital and Persistent Inequality

Available evidence suggests high intergenerational correlation of economic status and persistent disparities in health status between the rich and the poor. This paper proposes a mechanism linking the two. We introduce health capital into a two-period overlapping generations model. Private health investment improves the probability of surviving from the first period of life to the next and, along with education, enhances an individual’s labor productivity. Poorer parents are of poor health, unable to invest much in reducing mortality risk and improving their human capital. Consequently, they leave less for their progeny. Despite convex preferences and technologies, initial differences in economic and health status may perpetuate across generations when annuities markets are imperfect.Additional support was provided by the National Science Foundation. Additional support was provided by the National Science Foundation.     

Can the augmented Solow model explain China’s remarkable economic growth? A cross-country panel data analysis

China’s economy grew at an average annual rate of 9% over the last three decades. Despite the vast empirical literature on testing the neoclassical model of economic growth using data on various groups of countries, very few cross-country regressions include China and none of them particularly focuses on the explanation of China’s remarkable economic growth. We attempt to fill this gap by utilising panel data on 146 countries over the period 1980–2004 to examine the extent to which the rapid growth of China and the huge gap in the growth rate between China and other countries can be explained by the augmented Solow model. Using system GMM estimation techniques, we find that, in spite of the restrictive assumptions involved, the Solow model augmented by both human capital and structural change provides a fairly good account of international variation in economic growth. In particular, China’s relative success in economic growth is due to high physical capital investment, conditional convergence gain, dramatic changes in the structure of employment and output, and low population growth.     

Capital formation and demographics

Low rates of saving and capital formation have been a disturbing and persistent characteristic of the United States' economy. The leading explanation of this phenomenon is based on the effects of inflation under our nonindexed tax system—a financial explanation. This paper explores, with a simple life-cycle savings model with irreversible capital, whether a real explanation exists. The analysis indicates that plausible prospective declines in the growth rate of the working-age population can lower the equilibrium interest rate and the rates of saving and capital formation in spite of a relatively high marginal product of capital. The policy implications of the real explanation are also discussed.     

On the level of optimal capital import in a decentralized competitive economy

In a competitive economy, capital import will affect the distribution of income among domestic economic units. Our main aim is to determine the optimal level of capital import, given that the distribution of income among people is accounted for. In order to consider explicitly the effect of capital import on saving behavior, we shall adopt a simple, two-period life cycle growth model. It will be shown that in order to know if the government can increase everybody's long-run utility, the criterion of the golden rule is important.     

Energy,growth, and altruism

Energy conservation is accomplished by removing energy inefficiency, improving the efficiency of our products, or by reorganizing our consumption priorities. These steps are inextricably linked into the realities of labor and capital distribution. Three dilemmas attendant to any major analysis of this situation must be faced: the economic value of energy as related to labor and capital, life-style changes associated with reducing energy consumption, and the energy that would be required by consumers when they redirect their income toward energy saving activities.     

The impact of tax-deductible saving on dynamic efficiency

The simulations reported in this paper suggest that permitting unlimited tax deductivility for saving under a progressive personal income tax could have a more favourable impact on total personal saving and capital accumulation than even a switch to a progressive consumption tax.     

Fiscal Federalism and Capital Accumulation

This paper explores the effect of fiscal federalism on capital accumulation and growth in an overlapping-generations model. By relaxing the uniform-consumption requirement of a unitary system, fiscal federalism allows the economy to respond to a difference in public-good demands between young and old. Public-good levels and taxes move in opposite directions for the young and old as their different demands are fulfilled, and this leads to opposing changes in private-good consumption for the two groups. These changes disrupt the preferred time path of private consumption, which is restored by a change in saving. This change in turn alters the equilibrium capital intensity of the economy, and growth effects emerge during the transition to the new equilibrium.     

Growth and income inequality: a canonical model

Summary. We develop an endogenous growth model with elastic labor supply, in which agents differ in their initial endowments of physical capital. In this framework, the growth rate and the distribution of income are jointly determined. The key equilibrating variable is the equilibrium labor supply. It determines the rate of return to capital, which in turn affects both the rate of capital accumulation and the distribution of income across agents. We then examine the impact of various structural shocks on growth and distribution. We find that faster growth is associated with a more unequal, contemporaneous distribution of income, consistent with recent empirical findings.Received: 7 October 2004, Revised: 18 February 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: O17, O40.Cecilia García-Peñalosa: Correspondence toGarcía-Peñalosa would like to acknowledge the financial support received from the Institut d’Economie Publique (IDEP), Marseille. Turnovsky’s research was supported in part by the Castor endowment at the University of Washington. The paper has benefited from seminar presentations at the University of California, Riverside, and the University of Kansas, as well as from the comments of an anonymous referee.     

Government spending, capital accumulation and the optimal policy rule: The role of public service capital

In this paper, we modify the Djajić [Djajić, S., 1987. “Government Spending and the Optimal Rates of Consumption and Capital Accumulation,” Canadian Journal of Economics 20, 544–554.] model in such a way that government consumption expenditure provides utility to households via the total stock of government services rather than the government consumption flow alone. By using such a framework, we show that the optimality condition for the public service capital stock is the marginal rate of substitution between public service capital and consumption that equals the intertemporal marginal rate of transformation between the two goods. In addition, we show that the relationship between private consumption and public service capital in a household's utility plays an important role in determining the transitional behavior of relevant variables. We also examine the second-best government consumption expenditure policy. By contrast, in the standard flow specification, e.g., Turnovsky and Brock [Turnovsky, S.J. and Brock, W.A., 1980. “Time Consistency and Optimal Government Policies in Perfect Foresight Equilibrium,” Journal of Public Economics 13, 183–212.], Ihori [Ihori, T., 1990. “Government Spending and Private Consumption,” Canadian Journal of Economics 23, 60–69.], and Turnovsky and Fisher [Turnovsky, S.J. and Fisher, W.H., 1995. “The Composition of Government Expenditure and its Consequences for Macroeconomic Performance,” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 19, 747–786.], the second-best government consumption expenditure is decided on the basis that the marginal utility of consumption is equal to the discounted sum of the marginal utility of the government's flow spending.