Sophisticated agents with self-control problems value commitment devices that constrain future choices. Using Australian household data, I test whether these households value commitment devices in the form of illiquid pension contributions. Applying various probabilistic choice models, the...

This paper investigates whether the inclusion of housing in a household portfolio is important to the household’s intertemporal decision making. Households hold portfolios of assets rather than a Treasury bill and/or a stock index and make their spending decisions based on expected total...

This paper investigates whether the rate of interest such as the Treasury bill rate or the rate of return such as the return on a household portfolio is more relevant to the household’s intertemporal decision making. In a current era, households are diversifiers (to use Tobin’s 1958 term)...

Agent heterogeneity has been used in recent economic literature to justify nonlinear dynamics for the time paths of aggregate economic variables. In this paper, the mechanism through which heterogeneous agents leads to chaotic motion is explained. Adding to a system with initial behavior...

We explore commons problems when agents have access to capital markets. The commons has a high intrinsic rate of return but its fruits cannot be secured by individual agents. Resources transferred to the capital market earn lower returns, but are secure. In a two period model, we assess the...

This paper presents quantitative and qualitative data regarding the saving and asset-accumulation strategies used by low-income participants in Individual Development Account programs (IDAs). The results of a cross-sectional survey with 298 IDA participants and case studies with 15 IDA...

We study extinction in a commons problem in which agents have access to capital markets. When the commons grows more quickly than the interest rate, multiple equilibria are found for intermediate commons endowments. In one of these, extinction is hastened and welfare decreases in the endowment,...

We study the intertemporal utility maximization problem for Hindy- Huang-Kreps utilities. Necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality are given. An explicit solution is provided for a large class of utility functions. In particular, the case of separable power utilities with a finite time...

When the preference over intertemporal consumptions is of CIES type and human capital enters the production function in a secific way, we show that the optimum population growth rate is exactly the subjective discount rate in an infinite-horizon Ramsey Model.

The purpose of this paper is to survey the theoretical literature on wealth transfer taxation. The focus is normative: we are looking at the design of an optimal tax structure from the standpoint of both equity and efficiency. The gist of this survey is that the optimal design closely depends on...