This paper studies how capital-scarce countries should manage volatile resource income.  Existing literature recommends that capital-scarce countries invest domestically, but that volatile resource income should be saved in a foreign sovereign wealth fund.  I reconcile these by combining a...

Intertemporal preferences are difficult to measure. We estimate time preferences using a structural buffer stock consumption model and the Method of Simulated Moments. The model includes stochastic labor income, liquidity constraints, child and adult dependents, liquid and illiquid assets,...

A generalized version of the capital management problem posed in a classic paper by R.H. Strotz is analyzed for the case of the naive planner who fails to anticipate any impending change in his own preferences. By imposing progressively stronger restrictions on the primitive of the problem -...

The principles of how best to manage the various components of national wealth are outlined, where the permanent income hypothesis, the Hotelling rule and the Hartwick rule play a prominent role. As far as managing natural resource wealth is concerned, a case is made to use an intergenerational...

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy?  To address this pressing open question in public finance, we estimate a life-cycle model in which the optimal employment, retirement and consumption decisions of forward-looking...

In the past 30 years, microfinance has carried many promises of social and economic transformation, with the shift towards targeting women being seen as a major strategic move through which the promise of social development could be most effectively delivered.  However, ethnographic studies...

There is widespread agreement that given currently available data, we cannot accurately estimate the parameters of intertemporal allocation using GMM on Euler equations, whether they be exact or approximate. Our reading of this literature and our own results is that this is a small sample...

We examine whether credit contributes to business cycle fluctuations by dirctly affecting consumption rather than through the new well understood investment channel.

Counselling agencies assist borrowers in financial difficulties by administering repayment plans, the so-called debt management plans (DMPs).  In this paper, we use unique administrative data from a major credit counselling agency in the UK to analyze the determinants of debt repayment...

Households in developing countries use a variety of informal mechanisms to cope with risk, including mutual support and risk-sharing. These mechanisms cannot avoid that they remain vulnerable to shocks. Public programs in the form of food aid distribution and food-for-work programs are meant to...