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...

Post-retirement, the model in the main text (published in the Review of Economic Dynamics) reduces to the Merton (1969) problem, which has of course an exact solution. Pre-retirement, however, the agent holds an American option, namely, retire now or keep working. Problems involving American...

This paper analyzes the dispersion in consumption and earnings over the life-cycle. We first reexamine these facts by considering US data for the period (1980-2000) using alternative price deflators. We find that consumption and earnings dispersion increase with age, but that the increase in...

This paper provides a framework within which to study the equilibrium impact of alternative policies. We develop an overlapping generation, life-cycle model with endogenous education and crime choices. Education and crime depend on different dimensions of heterogeneity, which takes the form of...

A model with leisure production and endogenous retirement is used to explain the declining labor-force participation rates of elderly males. Using the Health and Retirement Study, the model is calibrated to cross-sectional data on the labor-force participation rates of elderly US males by age...

This paper presents a method to estimate the effects of a counterfactual policy intervention in the context of dynamic structural models where all the structural functions (i.e., preferences, technology, transition probabilities, and the distribution of unobservable variables) are...

This paper estimates a life cycle model of labor supply, retirement and savings behavior in which future health status and wages are uncertain. Individuals face a fixed cost of work and cannot borrow against future labor, pension, or Social Security income. The method of simulated moments is...

A growing body of theoretical and empirical work identifies the ability of a country's institutions to protect private property and provide incentives for investment as a key explanation for the persistent disparity in financial market development. We add to this literature by analyzing the...

Financial liberalization is a controversial issue. One of the reasons is that many empirical studies report conflicting views. So far, negligible effects were found in savings and lending, while positive effects in allocating capital efficiently. However, these regression based studies are not...