we identify conditions under which preferences over sets of construction opportunities can be reduced to preferences over bundles of "commodities".

Building on Kihlstrom and Mirman (1974)’s formulation of risk aversion in the case of multidimensional utility functions, we study the effect of risk aversion on optimal behavior in a general consumer’s maximization problem under uncertainty. We completely characterize the relationship...

We study the effect of changing income on optimal decisions in the multidimensional expected utility framework with strongly separable preferences. Using the Kihlstrom and Mirman (1974) (KM) utility representation, we show that the effect of changing income can be decomposed into a modified...

We identify conditions under which preferences over sets of consumption opportunities can be reduced to preferences over bundles of "commodities". We distinguish ordinal bundles, whose coordinates are defined up to monotone transformations, from cardinal bundles, whose coordinates are defined up...

We develop a model where families consist of one parent and one child, with children diering in income and all agents having the same probability of becoming dependent when old. Young and old individuals vote over the size of a social long term care transfer program, which children complement...

This paper estimates a reduced form model of the Canadian mortgage demand from 1971 to 2010. Three equations are estimated, one for the average real value of new mortgage loans originated, another one for the number of new loans and a third for the flow of real repayment of existing loans. The...

We examine how long-term life insurance contracts can be designed to incorporate uncertain future bequest needs. An individual who buys a life insurance contract early in life is often uncertain about the make up of his or her future family, much less their financial needs. Ideally, the...

The standard model of intertemporal choice assumes risk neutrality toward the length of life: due to additivity, agents are not sensitive to a mean preserving spread in the length of life. Using a survey fielded in the RAND American Life Panel (ALP), this paper provides empirical evidence on...

Using a unique dataset on health club attendance from Quebec, we look at the relationship between actual and expected attendance and how these relate to measures of self-control. We find that a large majority of contract choices appear inconsistent if we do not take into account the commitment...

Prior studies disagree regarding the effectiveness of financial literacy programs, especially those offered in the workplace. To explain such measurement differences in evaluation and outcomes, we employ a stochastic life cycle model with endogenous financial knowledge accumulation to...