Using a lifecycle model of consumption, saving and portfolio choice combined with linked survey and administrative data on wealth and lifetime earnings we evaluate measures of retirement preparedness. We estimate heterogeneous discount factors for households and compare the estimates of their...

We investigate partial insurance and group risk sharing in extended family networks. Our approach is based on decomposing income shocks into group aggregate and idiosyncratic components, allowing us to measure the extent to which each is insured, having accounted for public insurance programs....

We investigate partial insurance and group risk sharing in extended family networks. Our approach is based on decomposing income shocks into group aggregate and idiosyncratic components, allowing us to measure the extent to which each component is insured. We apply our framework to extended...

Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of...

We specify an equilibrium model of car ownership with private information where individuals sell and purchase new and second-hand cars over their life-cycle. This private information introduces a transaction cost, distorts the market and reduces the value of a car as a savings instrument. We...

Conventional economics supposes that agents value the present vs. the future using an exponential discounting function. In contrast, experiments with animals and humans suggest that agents are better described as hyperbolic discounters, whose discount function decays much more slowly at large...

The world macro saving fact concerns the total financial saving of the world's private sector divided by world GDP. Relative to changes before 1994, there was a huge fall in this ratio between 1995 and 2000, a huge increase between 2000 and 2003, a huge fall between 2003 and 2006, and a huge...

This paper presents estimates of key preference parameters of the Epstein and Zin (1989, 1991) and Weil (1989) (EZW) recursive utility model, evaluates the model's ability to fit asset return data relative to other asset pricing models, and investigates the implications of such estimates for the...

This paper shows that about 70 percent of the variance of the yearly change in the world private financial saving rate can be explained by lagged changes in world stock and housing prices for the sample period 1982-2013. The results suggest that increased fluctuations in asset prices since 1995...

We specify and estimate a lifecycle model of consumption, housing demand and labor supply in an environment where individuals may file for bankruptcy or default on their mortgage. Uncertainty in the model is driven by house price shocks, education specific productivity shocks, and catastrophic...