The first essay of this dissertation examines at the micro level some empirical implications of what one might broadly term "life cycle savings" theories. The data used here are amongst the most comprehensive available for the U.S. as far as its coverage of individual wealth holdings (the Survey of Financial Characteristics of Consumers and the Survey of Changes in Family Finances). An analysis of wealth-age profiles and wealth regressions was undertaken. Results were not generally supportive of the life cycle. Rather, results were sensitive to the age group breakdown chosen for the wealth profile analysis and to the specification of the income term in the wealth regressions.;The second essay examines the market for a partially nonexcludable commodity under the assumption that the government can impose various degrees of copyright protection to mitigate the nonexcludable nature of the good. Previous authors who have considered such partially nonexcludable goods have claimed that an increase in copyright protection will have the following two effects on social welfare. First, it will decrease the social welfare loss due to underproduction. Second, it will increase the social welfare loss due to underutilization. In this paper we investigate these claims in a formal setting by analyzing a model in which consumers vary only in terms of their costs of obtaining a reproduction. Our analysis provides partial support to the first claim of these previous authors while giving little or no support to the second claim.;The final part of this analysis consisted of an analysis of a subset of observations whose head was, inter alia, male, employed in 1962 and between 55 and 64 years of age. The aim here was to examine the importance of social security wealth in determining total wealth holdings, just as Feldstein and Pellechio had done in 1978 using the same data set. Our analysis here indicated that results are not robust to a number of highly pertinent changes in the basic experimental design used by Feldstein and Pellechio.
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