This paper uses a heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model to examine the fiscal and distributional consequences of introducing a means test in US Social Security. I find that a means test, that is, conditioning benefit payments on a household's earnings or assets, leads to a higher...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

In the present paper an empirical analysis will point out that government debt as a percentage of GDP has a negative impact (among others) on banking profitability. This impact will be even worse when this debt as a percentage of GDP exceeds a certain critical level. The sample covers during the...

This paper analyzes panic buying of storable consumer goods, using a novel macroeconomic model of consumers' inventory adjustment featuring search frictions in shopping. Even if consumers are fully rational, an anticipated temporary increase in consumer shopping costs (caused by a disaster...

We study the consumption and portfolio selection problem of an agent who faces consumption irreversibility: there is disutility from changing consumption levels. The derived preference exhibits intertemporal loss aversion toward consumption changes with the previous consumption level being the...

This paper studies how "rational inattention (RI)" -- a type of information processing constraint proposed by Sims (2003) -- affects the joint dynamics of consumption and income in a permanent income model with general income processes. Specifically, I propose an analytical approach to solve the...

Recessions often have detrimental effects on both employment and equity returns, forcing individuals to make decisions about how to balance risks to their labor and capital income. In this paper, we study how individuals allocate their limited attention between capital income and labor income...

Creditors, banks and bank regulators should evaluate whether a borrower is likely to default. I apply several techniques in the extensive mathematical literature of stochastic optimal control/dynamic programming to derive an optimal debt in an environment where there are risks on both the asset...

Banks should evaluate whether a borrower is likely to default. I apply several techniques in the extensive mathematical literature of stochastic optimal control/dynamic programming to derive an optimal debt in an environment where there are risks on both the asset and liabilities sides. The...