How should changes in environmental quality occurring in the future be discounted? To answer this question we consider a model of “ecological discounting,” where the representative consumer has a utility function defined over two attributes, consumption and environmental quality, which...

We analyze precautionary saving behavior in a framework with labor and non-labor income risks, an endogenous supply of labor, and a representation of preferences that disentangles attitudes towards risk, attitudes towards intertemporal smoothing, and ordinal preferences for consumption and...

This note investigates the impact of investors' memory limitations on stock-market prices. I consider a simple asset-pricing model in which investors allocate limited cognitive resources to retrieve information from memory and to learn about the data generating process of multiple assets. I show...

Pooled forecasts frequently outperform individual forecasts of economic time series. This paper shows that the introduction of model uncertainty into the formation of expectations can account for the regularity. We conjecture that agents learn in a Bayesian way, using an optimally designed...

A large strand of research has identified when (i) a single risk is undesirable and (ii) two independent risks aggravate each other. We extend this line of inquiry by establishing when (iii) mutual aggravation is greater for greater risks. This natural property of \textit{greater mutual...

In this paper, we analyze the two sides of the publication problem: the problem faced by impatient researchers attempting to balance the considerations of journal quality, submission lags, and acceptance probabilities in choosing appropriate outlets for their work and that of journals facing a...

In this paper we analyse the risk attitude of a group of heterogenous agents and we develop a theory of comparative collective risk tolerance. In particular, we characterize how shifts in the distribution of individual levels of risk tolerance affect the representative agent's degree of risk...

In this paper we introduce a tractable social welfare function that is rich enough to disentangle preferences towards risk in health outcomes from preferences towards health inequalities across individuals. Given this preference specification we evaluate how uncertainty over the severity of...

In this paper we extend the theory of precautionary saving to the case in which uncertainty is multidimensional and we develop a matrix-measure of multivariate prudence. Furthermore, we characterize comparative prudence, decreasing and increasing prudence, the effect of uncertainty on the...

We analyze how commodity price variability affects saving behavior in a dynamic model with multiple commodities, portfolio hedging, and a preference structure that disentangles attitudes towards risk and attitudes towards intertemporal substitution. We show that the effect of price variability...