It is commonly thought that a picture is worth a thousand words. If that is so, one might ask how much data is a piece of advice worth. In other words, if advice is important than we should be able to measure it in two ways: How much data would a rational decision maker be willing to give up in...

In this paper we build on the Cunha, Heckman and Navarro (2005) and show that labor earnings risk has increased considerably over time and it has increased more for lower skill groups than higher skill groups

We study how the use of judgement or add-factors in macroeconomic forecasting may disturb the set of equilibrium outcomes when agents learn using recursive methods. We isolate conditions under which "exuberance equilibria" exist in standard macroeconomic environments. These equilibria may...

In this paper, we study the decision to purchase life insurance as part of a lifecycle plan of consumption, savings, and labor supply. Households are subject to idiosyncratic risk in their labor productivity as well as the composition and size of their family, and respond by accumulating...

In this paper we study the quantitative properties of alternative social security regimes in a large overlapping generations model where households face uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. We study this issue in two model economies. The first is the standard one characterized by exogenous...

In this paper we examine the risk situation facing individuals in the labor market. The current consensus in the literature is that the labor income process has a large random walk component. We argue two points. First, the direct estimates of this parameter (from labor income data) appear to be...

Idiosyncratic household income is typically assumed to consist of several components. While the total income is observed and is often modelled as an integrated moving average process, individual components are not observed directly. In the literature, econometricians typically assume that...

This paper examines the extent to which intergenerational links through transfers of wealth and investment in human capital might help in accounting for the wealth inequality observed in U.S. data. We examine an overlapping-generations heterogeneous agents economy with idiosyncratic risk and...

This paper characterizes the set of differentiable subgame perfect equilibria in a continuous time intertemporal decision optimization problem with non-constant discounting. The idea of an infinitesimal self is formalized and the equilibrium characterization takes the form of an integral...