TY  - JOUR
AU  - Auerbach,Alan J.
AU  - Hassett,Kevin
TI  - Corporate Savings and Shareholder Consumption
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 2994
PY  - 1991
Y2  - October 1991
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2994
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w2994.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alan J. Auerbach
Department of Economics
508-1 Evans Hall, #3880
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
Tel: 510/643-0711
Fax: 510/643-0413
E-Mail: auerbach@econ.berkeley.edu

Kevin Hassett
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
E-Mail: khassett@aei.org
M1  - published as Alan J. Auerbach, Kevin Hassett. "Corporate Savings and Shareholder Consumption," in B. Douglas Bernheim and John B. Shoven, editors, "National Saving and Economic Performance" University of Chicago Press (1991)

M2  - featured in NBER digest on 1988-10-01
AB  - This paper reexamines the implications of changing corporate savings, testing for the presence of a "corporate veil". We argue that previous tests for such s veil have lacked proper focus, identifying influences of corporate saving on private saving that are entirely consistent with a complete piercing of the corporate veil. We formulate two tests. Results based on the first find that wealth-neutral changes In corporate dividend policy do not significantly affect aggregate consumption, suggesting that no corporate veil exists, The second test finds the aggregate consumption response to changes in corporate wealth is close to zero, consistent with the presence of a veil but also with heterogeneity in the population with respect to consumption behavior.
ER  -