This paper incorporates fertility and altruism into the ``value of life'' framework. Two dimensions of fertility and altruism are important in evaluating life expectancy and health related gains. First, child mortality can be very important in determining welfare in a context where individuals...

What does your medical expenditure do to your health? Researchers often get significant negative sign on the relative coefficient in the reduced form health production regression. The puzzling result motivates this simple dynamic quantitative general equilibrium model to study the relationships...

Analyzing a variety of cross-national and sub-national data sources, we show that high adult mortality reduces economic growth by shortening time horizons. Higher adult mortality is associated with increased levels of risky behavior, higher fertility and lower investment in physical and human...

This paper investigates the impact of borrowing constraints on human capital accumulation and welfare. In a standard overlapping-generations model where parental altruism results in transfers that children allocate to consumption and education, the average level of welfare is higher when...

I analyze the implications of moral hazard in dynamic economy with production. In particular, I add agency frictions to a benchmark stochastic growth model, by assuming that firms observe output but hours worked and productivity are unobservable. I cast the problem as a continuous time principal...

Through marriage, individuals can share some risks that would otherwise be uninsurable. In this paper, we ask how much idiosyncratic income risk can be diversified away through marriage contracts alone versus how much risk there remains for public unemployment insurance programs to alleviate. We...

We study a multiperiod principal-agent problem with moral hazard in which the agent is required to exert effort only in the initial period of the contract. The effort choice of the agent in this first period determines the conditional distribution of output in the following periods. The paper...

The complete insurance hypothesis is soundly rejected by the data (e.g. Attanasio and Davis, 1996). On the other hand, the permanent income model assumes that the only mechanism available to the agents to smooth consumption is personal savings (self insurance). Those are clearly two extreme...