This paper develops a model of marriage, labor supply, savings and divorce under limited commitment and uses it to understand the impact of major welfare reforms, including the time-limited eligibility in the TANF program. In the model, taxes and welfare can affect whether marriage and divorce...

We use longitudinal data on consumption, disability status, disability insurance recipiency, and earnings to measure the welfare loss of disability shocks. We decompose earnings risk into shocks due to the emergency of disability and shocks to general productivity. We then examine the issue of...

We define the distinction between productivity and employment risk and estimate the components of risk using wage and mobility data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We then calibrate a model of intertemporal consumption and labor supply and study the effect of the two sources of risk on...

Female labour force participation and labour supply, in the US, as in many other developed countries, has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. If one compares cohorts of women born in the 1930s (such as Elizabeth Dole), 1940s (Hillary Clinton) and 1950s (Oprah Winfrey), two main features...

In this paper we examine the link between wage inequality and consumption inequality using a life cycle model that incorporates household consumption and family labor supply decisions. We derive analytical expressions based on approximations for the dynamics of consumption, hours, and earnings...

We develop a life cycle framework with two individuals within the family (husband and wife) making decisions about household consumption and their individual labor supply, subject to uncertainty about offered market wages. The response of consumption to permanent wage shocks depends on two...

The theory of intertemporal consumption choice makes sharp predictions about the evolution of the entire distribution of household consumption, not just about its conditional mean. In a first step, we study the empirical transition matrix of consumption using a panel drawn from the Bank of Italy...

We use matched employer-employees data for Italy to study the joint response of wages and employment to firm-level shocks. We construct a simple dynamic general equilibrium model of labor demand and supply that allows us to identify separately firing (or internal) and mobility (or external)...