Since the early 2000s, the importance of financial literacy for safe financial behaviors has increased in public debate and has been the motivation for several national and international institutions to launch and promote financial education initiatives. Although discussion on the effects of...

This Paper introduces state dependent utility into the standard Mehra and Prescott (1985) economy by allowing the representative agent’s coefficient of relative risk aversion to vary with the underlying economy’s growth rate. Existence of equilibrium is proved and its asymptotic properties...

Survey and option data are used to take a new look at the equity premium puzzle. Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data (CBOE's VIX) indicates that investors overestimate the volatility of equity...

Probably not. First, allowing the probabilities of the states of the economy to differ from their sample frequencies, the Consumption-CAPM is still rejected in both U.S. and international data. Second, the recorded world disasters are too small to rationalize the puzzle unless one assumes that...

The representative agent model (RA) has dominated macroeconomics for the last thirty years. This model does a reasonably good job of explaining the co-movements of consumption, investment, GDP and employment during normal times. But it cannot easily explain movements in asset prices. Two facts...

We develop a simple overlapping generations model in which the young have a choice in investing in equities and index-linked bonds. Projections of share price uncertainty over a 30-year period show that the risk associated with such a long-term investment predicts an equity premium that matches...

Business cycles reflect changes over time in the amount of trade between individuals. In this paper we show that incorporating explicitly intra-temporal gains from trade between individuals into a macroeconomic model can provide new insight into the potential mechanisms driving economic...

It is relatively well known that the introduction of consumption taxation as an alternative in the tax code, and as the main source of government revenues, leads to a more efficient tax system. However the conventional wisdom is that the change from the actual tax code, based on taxation of...

This paper studies the effects of progressive income taxes and education finance in a dynamic heterogeneous agent economy. Such redistributive policies entail distortions to labour supply and savings, but also serve as partial substitutes for missing credit and insurance markets. The resulting...

Value and momentum portfolios exhibit strong opposite signed exposure to an aggregate risk factor based on low frequency fluctuations in the capital share. This strong opposite signed exposure helps explain why both strategies earn high average returns yet are negatively correlated. But the...