It is unlikely that husbands and wives always agree on exactly what public goods to buy. Nor do they necessarily agree on how many hours to work with obvious consequences for the household budget. We therefore model consumption and labor supply behavior of a couple in a non-cooperative setting...

We present identification and estimation results for the 'collective' model of labour supply in which there are discrete choices, censoring of hours and non-participation in employment. We derive the collective restrictions on labour supply functions and contrast them with restrictions implied...

Employing a variant of GARP, we study consistency in aging by comparing the choices of younger adults (YA) and older adults (OA) in a 'simple', two-good and a `complex' three-good condition. We find that OA perform worse than YA in the complex condition but similar in the simple condition....

We study infrequent durables stock adjustment by consumers who also derive utility from non-durable consumption flows, in the presence of idiosyncratic income uncertainty. We first characterize how the extent of uncertainty bears theoretically on the cross-sectional distribution of the...

Using a unique panel data set from a UK credit card company, we analyze the interest rate sensitivity of subprime credit card borrowers. In addition to all individual transactions and loan terms, we also have access to details of a randomized interest rate experiment conducted by the lender on...

Pricing policy for any experience good faces a key tradeoff. On one hand, a price reduction increases immediate demand and hence more people learn about the product. On the other hand, lower prices may serve as price anchors and, through a comparison effect, decrease subsequent demand. This...

We study a two-stage sequential search model with two agents who compete for one job. The agents arrive sequentially, each one in a different stage. The agents' abilities are private information and they are derived from heterogeneous distribution functions. In each stage the designer chooses an...

Can people be helped to stick to their plans with a little help from information? We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of reminders and feedback on investment activities involving up-front costs and delayed benefits, such as education and healthy behavior. By means of a...

This paper proposes a theoretical explanation of the empirical finding that private consumption increases in response to an increase in government spending. The explanation requires two ingredients. First, labor demand expands (e.g. prices are sticky). Second, general non-separable preferences...

We study a class of utility functions that are defined recursively by an aggregator function. In single-agent economies it is known that a sufficient condition for the existence of a balanced growth path is that utility should be homogenous. In the context of a multi-agent economy we show that...