This paper introduces a tractable, structural model of subjective beliefs. Since agents that plan for the future care about expected future utility flows, current felicity can be increased by believing that better outcomes are more likely. On the other hand, expectations that are biased towards...

A large literature in behavioral and social sciences has found that human wellbeing follows a U-shape over age. Some theories have assumed that the U-shape is caused by unmet expectations that are felt painfully in midlife but beneficially abandoned and experienced with less regret during old...

I present a model of social learning over an exogenous, directed network that may be readily nested within broader macroeconomic models with dispersed information and combines the attributes that agents (a) act repeatedly and simultaneously; (b) are Bayes-rational; and (c) have strategic...

We provide a critique of the methods that have been used to derive measures of income risk and draw attention to the importance of demographic factors as a source of income risk. We also propose new measures of the contribution to total income risk of demographic and labour market factors....

The stylized fact that public announcements in financial markets are followed by intense trading, high trading volume and volatile prices, is widely perceived as the sign of increasing disagreement due to the announcement. However, it is common to argue that this would be inconsistent with...

When fairly homogeneous taxpayers are affected by common income shocks, a tax agency’s optimal auditing strategy consists of auditing a low-income declarer with a probability that (weakly) increases with the other taxpayers’ declarations. Such policy generates a coordination game among...

We solve a model with incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents that generates a large equity premium, while simultaneously matching stock market participation and individual asset holdings. The high risk premium is driven by incomplete risk sharing among stockholders, which results from the...

This paper solves an empirically parameterized model of households’ optimal demand for nominal and inflation indexed annuities. The model incorporates mortality, inflation, and real interest rate risk. The model draws some interesting predictions. First, the welfare calculations on the access...

The aim of this paper is to survey the 'hard' evidence on the effects of subjective well-being. In doing so, we complement the evidence on the determinants of well-being by showing that human well-being also affects outcomes of interest such as health, income, and social behaviour. Generally, we...

We investigate whether a rare event (like the default of the annuity provider) can explain the annuity market participation puzzle. High risk aversion is needed to change behavior in the presence of such a disastrous shock but higher risk aversion also makes annuities more valuable. Therefore,...