While most economists agree that the recent worldwide financial crises evolved as a consequence of the US house price bubble, the related literature yet failed to deliver a consensus on the question when exactly the bubble started developing. The estimates in the literature range in between 1997...

This paper empirically studies the effects of fiscal policy shocks on private consumption. Further, it tries to determine if the level of government bond yield and the unemployment rate affect that relationship. We use yearly data between 1970 and 2000 for thirty-eight countries, of which half...

We study risk attitudes, ambiguity attitudes, and time preferences of 661 children and adolescents, aged ten to eighteen years, in an incentivized experiment and relate experimental choices to field behavior. Experimental measures of impatience are found to be significant predictors of...

Whole life insurance plays an important role in household saving. However, empirical evidence on its determinants is scarce. This paper studies two natural experiments to identify the effects of tax incentives and bequest motives on life-insurance demand. An unanticipated tax reform in 2000...

In this paper we analyze the relationship between unemployment and consumption. We study this relationship with panel data on households in five countries: Spain and Italy (the South), and Germany, Britain, and the US (the North). Our empirical results indicate that an increase in the duration...