This paper studies the link between group-specic consumption growth and volatility within a framework of heterogeneous agents, under the assumption of a consumption externality. Household preferences are related to the volatility through asset holding decisions: volatility decreases with groups'...

Theoretical studies suggest that unexpected changes in future mortality and survival probabilities (stochastic mortality) are important determinants of individuals’ decisions about consumption, saving, asset allocation, and retirement timing. Using data on subjective survival expectations...

A deferred annuity typically includes an option-like right for the policyholder. At the end of the deferment period, he may either choose to receive annuity payouts, calculated based on a mortality table agreed to at contract inception, or receive the accumulated capital as a lump sum....

We exploit the natural experiment of the 2005 income tax reform in Germany to study the effects of tax incentives on consumer behavior in life insurance markets. Our empirical analysis of sociodemographic, economic, and psychological household characteristics elicited in the German SAVE study...

This paper analyzes dynamic equilibrium risk sharing contracts between profit-maximizing intermediaries and a large pool of ex-ante identical agents that face idiosyncratic income uncertainty that makes them heterogeneous ex-post. In any given period, after having observed her income, the agent...

Much of the industrialized world is undergoing a significant demographic shift, placing strain on public pension systems. Policymakers are responding with pension system reforms that put more weight on privately managed retirement funds. One concern with these changes is the effect on individual...

When agents do not know where to find a match, they search. However, agents could direct their search to agents who strategically choose a certain signal. Introducing cheap talk to a model of sequential search with bargaining, we find that signals will be truthful if there are mild...

This note reconsiders communication between an informed expert and an uninformed decision maker with a strategic mediator in a dis- crete Crawford and Sobel (1982) setting. We show that a strategic mediator may improve communication even when he is biased into the same direction as the expert....

In games with strategic complementarities, public information about the state of the world has a larger impact on equilibrium actions than private information of the same precision, because the former is more informative about the likely behavior of others. This may lead to welfare-reducing...

The paper analyzes the role of the structure of communication - i.e. who is talking with whom - on the choice of messages, on their credibility and on actual play. We run an experiment in a three-player coordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria, where a pair of agents has a profitable...