This paper empirically tests whether the asset limit associated with the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program discourages wealth accumulation by actual and prospective participants. Prior to 198 1, the AFDC asset test varied substantially across states, and this variation can be used to identify the effect of the limit on wealth. Wealth holdings for female-headed households (t...

BACKGROUND Despite the importance of socioeconomic position for survival, total wealth, which is a measure of accumulation of assets over the life course, has been underinvestigated as a predictor of mortality. We investigated the association between total wealth and mortality at older ages. METHODS We estimated Cox proportional hazards models using a sample of 10,305 community-dwelling indiv...

This article studies the impact of internal migration and remittance flows on wealth accumulation and distribution in 51 rural villages in Nang Rong, Thailand. Using data from 5,449 households, the study constructs indices of household productive and consumer assets with principal component analysis. The changes in these indices from 1994 to 2000 are modeled as a function of households' prior m...

versity. The author gratefully acknowledges helpful comments from two anonymous referees of this journal. 1Prior to Smith, the mercantilists were interested in this same question and thought that a nation’s accumulation of gold and silver increased its wealth, and the physiocrats argued that wealth is the product of the land, so encouraged agriculture. Thus the issue was raised before Smith’s m...

Pensions--broadly defined to include social security as well as employer-provided plans-comprise a significant component of total household resources, but their impact on household wealth accumulation is controversial. This paper reviews previous theoretical and empirical on how pensions affect saving. The empirical literature on the effects of traditional pensions and 401(k) plans contains a r...

This paper studies the causal mechanisms behind poverty traps, building on evidence of nonlinear wealth dynamics among a poor pastoralist population, the Boran from southern Ethiopia. In particular, it explores the roles of adverse weather shocks and individual ability to cope with such shocks in conditioning wealth dynamics. Using original data, we establish pastoralists’ expectations of herd ...

This paper formulates an overlapping generations model with both life–cycle saving and altruistic bequests. For a given distribution of earning abilities, the model generates a stationary steady–state capital–to–labor ratio for the economy as a whole and a stationary distribution of net worth among households. We calibrate the model, using the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances to fix the distrib...

Economic theory predicts that employer-provided retiree health insurance (RHI) benefits have a crowd-out effect on household wealth accumulation, not dissimilar to the effects reported elsewhere for employer pensions, Social Security, and Medicare. Nevertheless, we are unaware of any similar research on the impacts of retiree health insurance per se. Accordingly, the present paper utilizes a un...