This paper formalizes the idea that more hedging instruments may destabilize markets when traders are heterogeneous and adapt their behavior according to experience based reinforcement learning. We investigate three different economic settings, a simple mean-variance asset pricing model, a...

This paper argues that the introduction of a short-sale constraint in the Arrow-Radner framework invalidates standard definitions of complete and incomplete markets. In this constrained set-up, two threshold values with familiar properties arise.<BR> The case of a zero short-sale bound set on some...

Who is wealthy? This paper presents empirical estimates of household movements into and out of the top percents of the wealth distribution over individual life cycles. There are life-cycle motives and precautionary motives for wealth accumulation. The opportunities to accumulate wealth create...

Since the early nineties, the Dutch tax system allows for a tax-favored form of risk free savings through employer- sponsored savings plans (ESSPs). Under some conditions and up to a certain amount, the contributions to this plan are tax-deductible, and the returns as well as the withdrawals are...

Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between low and high socioeconomic status (SES) groups is hampered by the lack of a suffciently comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret empirical facts and to predict yet untested relations. We present a life-cycle model that...

Theoretical models predict a positive impact of the level of individual wealth on the job exit probability. Empirically this prediction is most likely to be relevant for elderly workers who have accumulated wealth throughout their working life and have a short residual working life. In the...

Most measures of vulnerability are a-theoretic and essentially static. In this paper we use a stochastic Ramsey model to find a household's optimal welfare and we measure vulnerability as the shortfall from the welfare attained if the household consumed permanently at the poverty line. The...

In this note we show that the standard, loglinear growth regression specification is consistent with one and only one model in the class of stochastic Ramsey models. This model is highly restrictive: it requires a Cobb-Douglas technology and a 100% depreciation rate and it implies that risk does...

There has been a revival of interest in the effect of risk on economic growth. We quantify both ex ante and ex post effects of risk using a stochastic version of the Ramsey model. We develop a simulation-based econometric methodology which allows us to estimate the model in the structural form...

The paper studies the effects of cross-country differences in the production process of human capital on income distribution and growth. Our overlapping gen- erations economy has the following features: (1) consumers are heterogenous with respect to parental human capital and wealth; (2)...