Both managerial ownership and performance are endogenously determined by exogenous (and only partly observed) changes in the firm's contracting environment. We extend the cross-sectional results of Demsetz and Lehn (1985), (Journal of Political Economy, 93, 1155–1177) and use panel data to show that managerial ownership is explained by key variables in the contracting environment in ways consistent with the predictions of principal-agent models. A large fraction of the cross-sectional variation in managerial ownership is explained by unobserved firm heterogeneity. Moreover, after controlling both for observed firm characteristics and firm fixed effects, we cannot conclude (econometrically) that changes in managerial ownership affect firm performance.

Micro data studies of household saving often find a significant group in the population with virtually no wealth, raising concerns about heterogeneity in motives for saving. In particular, this heterogeneity has been interpreted as evidence against the life cycle model of saving. This paper argues that a life cycle model can replicate observed patterns in household wealth accumulation after accounting explicitly for precautionary saving and asset-based, means-tested social insurance. We demonstrate theoretically that social insurance programs with means tests based on assets discourage saving by households with low expected lifetime income. In addition, we evaluate the model using a dynamic programming model with four state variables. Assuming common preference parameters across lifetime income groups, we are able to replicate the empirical pattern that low-income households are more likely than high-income households to hold virtually no wealth. Low wealth accumulation can be explained as a utility-maximizing response to asset-based, means-tested welfare programs.

The importance of disturbances in financial markets for real economic activity and the positive association between price level and output movements typically are explained by appeal to a combination of nominal aggregate demand shocks (particularly money-supply shocks) and rigid prices. We argue that this view is inconsistent with evidence for short-run responsiveness of prices and gold flows to nominal disturbances during the pre-World War I gold-standard era. We offer an alternative explanation that connects financial markets and real activity through disturbances to the availability of credit. This approach links comovements in prices and output through real effects in credit markets associated with price-level shocks. Empirical analysis, using monthly data for the pre-World War I period, supports the assumption of rapid price adjustment, and the credit-supply interpretation of the transmission of financial shocks. Disturbances to credit availability, including price shocks, contribute substantially to our empirical explanation of output fluctuations during this period.

One of the key puzzles in understanding behavior is not so much why people save-the title of this session-but why people don't save. According to the familiar life-cycle model, households should accumulate wealth to provide for their retirement consumption. The surprising result from the data is the sizable fraction of the population who have accumulated so little, even among those nearing retirement. Given that earnings will almost surely decline when households retire, such behavior can imply poor living standards for the elderly. Some might interpret the low wealth accumulation as being evidence of myopia, irrationality, or a failure of households to enforce mental accounting (Richard Thaler, 1994), while others might view the low level of wealth accumulation as evidence of high individual rates of time preference. Determining the underlying causes of low wealth is crucial for public policies that seek to alleviate low aggregate rates in the United States, as well as policies that seek to buttress the adequacy of financial resources for the elderly. In this paper, we outline what we believe to be the causes of why many people do not save. We conclude by speculating about government policies that may be most effective at encouraging saving. Much of the research examining levels of consumption, saving, and wealth, as well as their responsiveness to policy, has been done using a life-cycle model with the simplifying assumption of perfect certainty. Alan Auerbach and Laurence Kotlikoff (1987), for example, developed a model with 55 overlapping generations of individual lifecycle households, each with empirically plausible age-earnings profiles and utility parameters, and used the model to address tax policy and demographic issues in a regime in which all households are identical within a generation, and all generations know future earnings and interest rates. More recently, a line of inquiry has examined the effects of uncertainty on saving, generally in the context of highly stylized models. This research has shown that, in these models, uninsured earnings uncertainty can alter optimal behavior in a variety of important ways. (For a partial review of this precautionary saving literature, see Hubbard et al. [1994].) In two recent papers (Hubbard et al., 1993, 1994), we have combined these two strands of the literature by examining the implications of a life-cycle model of consumption, saving, and wealth accumulation subject to what we think are the three most important sources of uninsured idiosyncratic risk facing households: uncertainty about earnings, medical expenses, and length of life. Our intent has been to create a realistic model in which families live for many periods, working for part of their lives and retiring later in life. To parameterize the uncertainty facing families, we estimate tDiscussants: Christopher Carroll, Federal Reserve Board; John B. Shoven, Stanford University; Laurence Kotlikoff, Boston University.

This paper examines the impact of social security on national saving and individual welfare in the presence of realistic capital-market imperfections: market failure in the private provision of annuities and restrictions on borrowing against anticipated future wages. The introduction of social security increases lifetime welfare and reduces national saving if borrowing restrictions are absent. However, the increase in individual welfare is reduced, and in some cases eliminated, when borrowing constraints are taken into consideration. The substantial difference suggests the importance of reexamining the proportional payroll tax finance of social security.

Recent models of firm investment decisions stressing informational imperfections in capital markets provide a foundation for interpreting evidence that movements in internal finance can predict investment spending, even after one controls for measures of firms' investment opportunities. While such evidence is suggestive, it is often open to other interpretations. We examine these models using data on equipment investment in the U.S. agricultural sector. This sector is particularly interesting because it has experienced large fluctuations in net worth and the profitability of investment, and reasonable measures of net worth can be constructed. Our findings provide support for a class of "internal funds" models of investment under asymmetric information.

The authors reply to the comment by D. R. Kamerschen and J. Park on their 1988 paper published in this Review. They find that the econometric point raised by these authors is flawed, because differences in model structure and data are ignored. In particular, the importance of materials input in assessing price-cost margins is reiterated here and illustrated with the 1988 paper's original table. Other points of the comment are refuted by direct reference to statistical results and inferred conclusions in the 1988 paper.