We identify the causal effect of lump-sum severance payments on non-employment duration in Norway by exploiting a discontinuity in eligibility at age 50. We find that a severance payment worth 1.2 months’ earnings at the median lowers the fraction re-employed after a year by seven percentage...

How does risk affect saving? Empirical work typically examines the effects of detectible differences in risk within the data. How these differences affect saving in theoretical models depends on the metric one uses for risk. For labor-income risk, second-degree increases in risk require prudence...

In this paper we analyze a large sample of individual responses to six lottery questions. We derive a simultaneous estimate of risk aversion and the time preference discount rate per individual. This can be done because the consumption of a large prize is smoothed over a larger time period. It...

Several frictions restrict the government’s ability to tax assets. First, it is very costly to monitor trades on international asset markets. Second, agents can resort to nonobservable low-return assets such as cash, gold or foreign currencies if taxes on observable assets become too high....

We construct a dynamic model of a small open economy to analyze the effects of large energy subsidies. The model includes domestic energy production and consumption, trade in energy at world market prices, as well as private and public sector production. The model is calibrated to Egypt and used...

Using an intertemporal model of saving and capital accumulation we demonstrate that it is impossible for any binding minimum wage to increase the after-tax incomes of workers if the production function is Cobb-Douglas with constant returns to scale, or if there are no differences in ability...

We study implications of habit formation for optimal taxation. First, we show that taxation problems with habit formation can be analyzed using dynamic programming techniques. Second, we derive optimal labor and savings wedges for habit formation preferences. We show that habit formation...

In this paper we examine the role of mortgage equity withdrawal in explaining the decline of the US saving rate, since when house prices rise and mortgage rates are low, homeowners have an incentive to withdraw housing equity and this may affect the saving rate. We estimate a Vector Error...

We study asset-tested unemployment insurance in an incomplete markets model with moral hazard during job search. Asset testing has two counteracting effects on welfare. On the one hand, it improves consumption insurance by introducing state contingent transfers to agents most in need. On the...

Households in some European countries increased their indebtedness massively over the past 20 years. Besides household debt, also government debt and corporate debt are in some countries at levels not seen before. While there is a common agreement that these high debt levels are not sustainable...