Subjects who overestimate their performance in experimental tasks unrelated to travel are less willing to insure against failing in the task and also less inclined to buy travel insurance. This suggests intrinsic optimism influences insurance demand and diminishes adverse selection

This paper shows that the two main models in the buffer stock saving literature can be nested in a model that varies the level of available social insurance. Equivalently, the assumption about the time series process for labor income (and social insurance during unemployment) is crucial in...

Which pricing kernel restrictions are needed to make low dimensional Markov models consistent with given sets of predictions on aggregate stock-market fluctuations ? This paper develops theoretical test conditions addressing this and related reverse engineering issues arising within a fairly...

Time discounting is at the heart of economic decision-making. We disentangle hyperbolic discounting from subjective time perception using experimental data from incentive-compatible tests to measure time preferences, and a set of experimental tasks to measure time perception. The two behavioural...

Are households more likely to be homeowners when “housing risk” is higher? We show that home-ownership rates and loan-to-value (LTV) ratios at the city level are strongly negatively correlated with local house price volatility. However, causal inference is confounded by house price levels,...

This paper uses data from the British Household Panel Survey and the Attitudes to Inheritances Survey to estimate the magnitude of and the factors that are correlated with private inter-household transfers from parents to their adult children in the UK. Our evidence suggests that inter vivos...

This paper solves an empirically parameterised model of life-cycle consumption which extends the precautionary savings models of Carroll (1997), and Deaton (1991), to allow for uncollaterized borrowing and default. In case households choose to default: (i) their access to credit markets is...

This paper uses data from the British Household Panel Survey to shed further light on the fall in spending at retirement (the “retirement-consumption puzzle”). Comparing food spending for men retiring involuntarily early (through ill health or redundancy) with spending for those who retire...

We analyze the impact of an increase in the risk of divorce on the saving behaviour of married couples. From a theoretical perspective, the expected sign of the effect is ambiguous. We take advantage of the legalization of divorce in Ireland in 1996 as an exogenous increase in the likelihood of...

The analysis in this paper focuses on the impact of health on the savings and consumption decisions of the elderly. In principle, there are at least five alternative channels through which health may affect consumption and savings. Ill health may affect both consumption capacities and needs...