Essays on Saving, Bequests, Altruism, and Life‐Cycle Planning
本书收录了Laurence Kotlikoff的14篇论文，探讨美国储蓄率低、遗赠行为变化、财富不平等、利他主义对财政政策的影响、跨期选择理性等问题，对研究家庭储蓄和代际转移的学者有参考价值。
In his introduction to this volume Laurence Kotlikoff describes succinctly what the book does: ‘This book tries to explain why our nation is saving so little, why its bequest behaviour is changing, why wealth is so unequally distributed, whether altruism influences household responses to fiscal policies, how altruism might be modelled, how to formally test the rationality of intertemporal economic choice, whether people are capable of making consistent and appropriate intertemporal decisions, whether they do make such decisions, whether they have the knowledge and tools to help them in that process, and, finally, what they should be doing to prepare for the future’. It is a tribute to the work of Kotlikoff that this volume, which reprints 14 papers of his, largely written over the past 10 years, succeeds so well in saying something substantive about each of this long list of issues. The majority of the papers have already appeared in academic journals. But the links between his various papers are close and the issues that are addressed so inter‐related that bringing them together into one volume is amply justified. Furthermore, there are four unpublished papers in the volume, largely concerned with financial planning over the life cycle.