What is the main explanation for savings? Is it primarily accumulation for retirement as
claimed by Albert Ando, Richard Brumberg, and Franco Modigliani in their celebrated Life …

This paper responds to Franco Modigliani's recent critique of our 1981 paper on the
importance of intergenerational transfers for US savings. Modigliani's paper is the latest …

What determines savings? The question is timely and important. The US saving rate is less
than half that of Japan, Germany, and other developed countries, and the imbalance in …

The purpose of this paper is to review what economists know at present about the following
question: How large a portion of the existing wealth is the result of a bequest motive, that is …

This paper uses household data to provide direct estimates of intergenerational transfers as
a source of wealth. The authors distinguish between intended transfers (for example, gifts to …

This paper uses historical US data to directly estimate the contribution of intergenerational
transfers to aggregate capital accumulation. The evidence presented indicates that …

Although recent research suggests that intergenerational transfers play an important role in
aggregate capital accumulation, our understanding of bequest motives remains incomplete …

Empirical work on intergenerational transfers has focused on distinguishing between
altruistic and exchange motivated behavior. However, these two models are unable to …

As the workhorse of consumption and saving research for the past four decades, the life-
cycle model has proved flexible and useful for examining a variety of questions. In a classic …

Recent work by a number of economists has opened a debate about the role played by
intergenerational transfers. Using the new Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), we are …