Time preference is a key determinant of occupational choice and investments in human capital. Since careers are characterized by different wage growth prospects, individual discount rates play an important role in the relative valuation of jobs or occupations. We predict that individuals with...

This paper analyzes optimal portfolio choice and consumption with stochastic volatility in incomplete markets. Using the Duffie-Epstein (1992) formulation of recursive utility in continuous time, it shows that the optimal portfolio demand for stocks under stochastic volatility varies strongly...

Integrated assessment models have become the primary tools for comparing climate policies that seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Policy comparisons have often been performed by considering a planner who seeks to make optimal trade-offs between the costs of carbon abatement and the...

This paper provides a critical review of the literature on choosing social discount rates (SDRs) for public cost-benefit analysis. We discuss two dominant approaches, the first based on market prices, and the second based on intertemporal ethics. While both methods have attractive features,...

We study the effects of monetary and fiscal policy in a heterogeneous-agent model where households have present-biased time preferences and naive beliefs. The model features a liquid asset and illiquid home equity, which households can use as collateral for borrowing. Because present bias...

We leverage a natural experiment in combination with data on adolescents' time preferences to assess whether there is heterogeneity in place effects on adolescent obesity. We exploit the plausibly exogenous assignment of military servicemembers, and consequently their children, to different...

In a canonical intertemporal consumption problem, I show how anticipation of future consumption mistakes leads to higher current marginal propensities to consume (MPCs). This result is driven by mistakes in future consumption's response to saving changes (i.e., changes in asset balances) and is...

This paper studies the relevance of cognitive uncertainty - subjective uncertainty over one's utility-maximizing action - for understanding and predicting intertemporal choice. The main idea is that when people are cognitively noisy, such as when a decision is complex, they implicitly treat...

The paper uses an intertemporal perfect-foresight optimizing model to analyze the effect of transitory terms-of-trade shocks on a small open . economy's current-account and utility time profiles. An adverse terms-of-trade shift known to be temporary induces the economy to run down its stock of...

Two economies, represented by Diamond-type overlapping-generations models and differing only in their pure rates of time preference, are joined together. Capital formation, balance-of-payments behavior, and welfare are compared under autarky and openness. With a positive natural rate of growth,...