Search Results
Working Paper
Recent trends in compensation practices
According to some accounts, compensation practices have recently been undergoing marked changes, with an increasing number of firms said to be substituting lump-sum payments for regular pay increases, allowing for greater variability of remuneration across individuals or groups, and making greater use of profit sharing or stock options. Many of these practices are outside the scope of the typical measures of economy-wide compensation growth. Moreover, intensified use of these schemes ought to heighten the responsiveness of overall compensation costs to business conditions and could also, in ...
Working Paper
The measurement of consumer expectations using survey data
Surveys of consumers collect considerable information on consumer expectations. However, the simple categorical structure of the questions -- such as "Do you expect your income to rise, fall, or stay the same?" -- makes their value for research uncertain. This paper analyzes the information content of the survey measures. I draw on Manski's finding that, while categorical questions do not identify the probability of an event occurring, they do provide information on probability bounds. I analyze data from two well-known surveys, showing that, although the bounds are often wide, for some ...
Working Paper
Household portfolios in the United States
This paper investigates the composition of households' assets and liabilities in the United States. Using aggregate and survey data, we document major trends in household portfolios in the past 15 years. We show that, despite the broad array of financial products available, the portfolio of the typical household remains fairly simple and safe, consisting of a checking account, savings account, and tax-deferred retirement account; in 1998, less than half of all households owned some form of stock. We use pooled data from the Survey of Consumer Finances to investigate determinants of portfolio ...
Working Paper
Workers' knowledge of their pension coverage: a reevaluation
Because employer-provided pensions represent an important source of income during retirement, accurate information on pension coverage would seem to be crucial for making sound decisions on retirement timing, saving, and portfolio allocation. However, previous research suggests that workers' knowledge of their pension provisions is often incomplete or incorrect. This paper reexamines workers' knowledge of their pension coverage, using matched employer-employee data from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances. We find that, while most workers in our sample accurately reported ...
Working Paper
Stock market wealth and consumer spending
This paper investigates the effects of stock market wealth on consumer spending. Traditional macroeconometric models estimate that a dollar's increase in stock market wealth boosts consumer spending by 3-7 cents per year. With the substantial 1990s rise in stock prices, the nature and magnitude of this "wealth effect" have been much debated. After describing the issues and reviewing previous research, I present new evidence from the SRC Surveys of Consumers. The survey results are broadly consistent with lifecycle saving and a modest wealth effect: Most stockholders reported no appreciable ...
Working Paper
Market definition and the analysis of antitrust in banking
In antitrust analysis of bank mergers, banking markets are viewed as geographically local, with a "cluster" of products as the relevant product line. This view is criticized as outdated, now that many bank products are offered by nonbank institutions and financial institutions' operations are increasingly national in scope. This paper reexamines the question of market definition in banking, using two micro data sets uniquely well-suited to the task. We find that local depositories remain the dominant supplier of key financial services to households and small businesses, with geographic ...
Working Paper
Household saving and portfolio change: evidence from the 1983-89 SCF panel
There are very few sources of high-quality data on the dynamics of wealth accumulation. This paper uses newly-available data from the 1983-89 panel of the Survey of Consumer Finances to examine household saving and portfolio change over the 1980s. The 1983 SCF collected detailed information on households' assets, liabilities, income and other characteristics for a sample of 4,103 families. In 1989, 1,479 of these families were re-interviewed using a similar questionnaire. After describing the sample and methodology of the panel survey, we analyze changes in household wealth over the 1983-89 ...
Journal Article
Family finances in the U.S.: recent evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances
Using data that have just become available from the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances along with data from the 1989 and 1992 versions of the survey, this article provides a detailed picture of recent changes in the income, net worth, assets, and liabilities of U.S. families. It also presents information on families' saving, unrealized capital gains, debt payments, and institutional providers of credit. Of the developments the article reports, a few are particularly noteworthy. First, between the 1992 and 1995 surveys, both median family income and median family net worth rose in constant ...
Working Paper
Technology, capital spending, and capacity utilization
This paper examines the relationships between technology, capital spending, and capacity utilization. Recent technological changes have increased the flexibility of relationships between inputs and outputs in manufacturing, which may have eroded the predictive value of the utilization rate. This paper considers how technology might be expected to affect utilization. We show that recent changes could either lower average utilization by making it cheaper to hold excess capacity, or raise utilization by making further changes in capacity less costly and time-consuming. We then examine the ...