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Conference Paper
Tax reform and capital formation
Working Paper
The capitalization and portfolio risk of insurance companies
The enormous growth in both Social Security and private pension plans has stimulated much interest in the impact of these retirement programs on individual saving behavior and the level of national saving. The first issue is the extent to which employees covered by pension plans reduce their own direct saving in response to expected retirement benefits; the response of individuals to guaranteed retirement income will determine, to a large extent, their well-being in retirement. For a nation concerned about saving and capital formation, the second issue is the impact of collectivized ...
Journal Article
The performance of traditional macroeconomic models of businesses' investment spending
The rate of capital formation by businesses has long been among the most closely watched elements of the national accounts. During the last decade, this component of investment attracted considerable interest as capital spending helped support our uncommonly high rate of economic growth. Not only did this spending lift the growth of aggregate demand, it also increased our capacity for supplying goods and services, which in turn could allow output to continue growing rapidly in the future. ; This article analyzes the performance of conventional models of investment spending by comparing their ...
Conference Paper
Insurance companies as financial intermediaries: risk and return
Working Paper
Economic rents, the demand for capital, and financial structure
The correspondence between the demand for capital and various measures of the return on assets, the cost of capital, and Tobin?s q often is tenuous (Abel and Blanchard 1986; Hayashi 1982), at times even perverse. Of a variety of possible explanations, this paper considers the consequences of allowing for declining returns to capital--a declining marginal efficiency of capital schedule (MEC). This modification not only relaxes the connection between the demand for capital and many of its traditional determinants, but it also may introduce a connection among the value of the firm, its financial ...
Journal Article
Risk and the capital of insurance companies
Insurance companies, like other financial institutions, have been evolving from specialized businesses to enterprises offering a variety of financial services. Rising interest rates impelled this evolution during much of the past three decades as most insurers tried to remain competitive. However, as insurers' profit margins subsided and they attracted new business, their assets generally grew more rapidly than their capital. To maintain the safety and soundness of insurance companies, regulators increasingly are adopting risk-based capital requirements instead of rules that limit insurers' ...