We investigate partial insurance and group risk sharing in extended family networks. Our approach is based on decomposing income shocks into group aggregate and idiosyncratic components, allowing us to measure the extent to which each is insured, having accounted for public insurance programs....

It is widely claimed that housing wealth, as well as stock prices, have an impact on consumption and hence on aggregate economic activity. This paper presents a broad overview of the issues that arise in evaluating this claim in the context of recent research in behavioral economics. Particular...

Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of...

Stock market price/earnings ratios should be influenced by demography. Since demography is predictable, stock returns should be as well. We provide a simple stochastic OLG model with a cyclical structure that generates cyclical P/E ratios. We calibrate the model to roughly fit the cyclical...

This paper reexamines the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) in the frequency domain. Using a simple model, we demonstrate that the PIH implies the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of zero frequency income is unity. The PIH also implies that the MPC out of transitory (or high frequency)...

This paper presents estimates of key preference parameters of the Epstein and Zin (1989, 1991) and Weil (1989) (EZW) recursive utility model, evaluates the model's ability to fit asset return data relative to other asset pricing models, and investigates the implications of such estimates for the...

The world macro saving fact concerns the total financial saving of the world's private sector divided by world GDP. Relative to changes before 1994, there was a huge fall in this ratio between 1995 and 2000, a huge increase between 2000 and 2003, a huge fall between 2003 and 2006, and a huge...

This paper shows that about 70 percent of the variance of the yearly change in the world private financial saving rate can be explained by lagged changes in world stock and housing prices for the sample period 1982-2013. The results suggest that increased fluctuations in asset prices since 1995...

This paper was begun during a visit at the Cowles Foundation in Fall 2000 and revised during a visit in Fall 2002: Michael Magill and Martine Quinzii are grateful for the stimulating environment and the research support provided by the Cowles Foundation. We are also grateful to Bob Shiller for...

Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. But are these biases learned or innate? We investigate this question using experiments on a novel set of subjects — capuchin monkeys. By introducing a fiat currency and trade to a capuchin...