This paper shows that liquidity constraints restrict job creation even with flexible labor markets. In a dynamic model of firm investment and demand for labor with imperfect capital markets, represented as a constraint on dividends, and imperfect labor markets, contained in legal firing costs...

\tThis paper presents and estimates a dynamic programming model model of retirement behavior that accounts explicitly for the effects of health cost volatility and and health insurance on retirement behavior. The model includes a savings decision so that we are able to analyze whether...

This paper introduces the quest for status into the Ramsey model with endogenous labor supply. We focus our attention on relative wealth preferences. In contrast to relative consumption preferences, they allow for the possibility that agents work too little in the long run, while under both...

We investigate possible determinants of the increase of household debt and smaller consumption fluctuations since the 1980s in the US. We use a heterogeneous-agent model, in which labor income is risky and markets are incomplete. Consumers use durables not only as collateral for their debt but...

Recently David Laibson (1998) and others have argued in favor of using hyperbolic discount functions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether conventional wisdom, based on the standard model with exponential discounting, also holds in the case where consumers have hyperbolic discount...

In this paper we show the extent that home ownership varies over the life-cycle and differs by cohort and by education. We explain these differences in a calibrated model of life-cycle behaviour where households choose labour supply and consumption and also home-ownership status. Home-ownership...

Homestead exemption is defined as the level of home equity that a household declaring bankruptcy can keep. This exemption level varies across states in the United States. As entreprenurial activities are risky, small business owners value the insurance the bankruptcy law provides. In their...