This paper considers the quantitative role of growth in the size of the social security program in contributing to the collapse of personal saving in the U.S. over the last few decades. Using a calibrated, general equilibrium life-cycle model this paper shows that social security may not be to...

We use a welfare-based intertemporal stochastic optimization model and historical data to estimate the size of the optimal intergenerational and liquidity funds and the corresponding resource dividend available to the government of the Canadian province Alberta. To first-order of approximation,...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We exploit a unique natural experiment for an empirical test of the effectiveness of...

We use the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a rather unique dataset with a long time dimension of panel information on consumption, income and wealth, to structurally estimate a buffer-stock saving model. We exploit the information contained in the joint dynamics of income,...

We use sizeable lottery prizes in Norwegian administrative panel data to characterize households' marginal propensities to consume (MPCs). Our main contribution is to document how MPCs vary with household characteristics and prize size, and how lottery prizes are spent and saved over time. We...

Most economic models assume that time preferences are stable over time, but the evidence on their long-term stability is lacking. We study whether and how time preferences change over the life cycle, exploiting representative long-term panel data. We provide new evidence that discount rates...

The empirical effectiveness of economic policies that operate theoretically through similar channels differs substantially. We document this fact by comparing an easy-to-grasp expectations-based policy, unconventional fiscal policy, with a policy whose implications are harder to understand by...

We consider a neoclassical growth model with quasi-hyperbolic discounting under Kantian optimization: each temporal self acts in a way that they would like every future self to act. We introduce the notion of a Kantian policy as an outcome of Kantian optimization in a given class of policies. We...

We show that perceptions of relative rank in the wealth distribution shape individuals' willingness to take risks. Using a representative large-scale survey, we manipulate perceptions of relative standing by randomly varying response categories when asking respondents about their wealth level....

We embed an experiment in a large-scale representative survey to investigate how relative wealth affects risk-taking and how this effect varies as a function of perceived control over life outcomes. Our results contest the common prediction of higher risk-taking in the middle of the...