Households who wish to extract home equity through refinancing their mortgage face a hidden transaction cost. The real value of the fixed nominal mortgage payment declines over time with inflation. The change in the real value of the mortgage payments from taking on a new mortgage is positive...

The focus of this paper is to analyze the effect that ambiguity will have on the buyer's reservation price and the value of the option to purchase the durable good with an embedded option to resell it. The agent is assumed to be risk neutral and ambiguity averse. The problem is formulated as an...

We analyze the implication of time-inconsistent preferences in educational decision making and corresponding policies using a structural dynamic choice model. Based on a novel identification approach, we exploit variation in average years invested in degree attainment through various educational...

Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer...

This paper empirically investigates the effects of changes in the interest rate as well as transitory income uncertainty on households' consumption-savings decision. Applying a structural demand model to German survey data, we estimate the uncompensated interest rate elasticity for savings, in...

This paper extends the idea of using ex-ante risk measures in a model of precautionary savings by explicitly simulating future net-income risks. The uncertainty measure takes into account the interdependency of labour market status and health. The model is estimated for prime age males using the...

We study the asset pricing implications of a general equilibrium Lucas endowment economy inhabited by two agents with habit formation preferences. Preferences are modeled either as internal or external habits. We allow for agents' heterogeneity in relative risk aversion and habit strength. We...

This paper explores the microfoundations of consumption models and quantifies the macro implications of consumption heterogeneity. We propose a new empirical method to estimate the response of consumption to permanent and transitory income shocks for different groups of households. We then apply...

A well-established result in the literature is that Social Security tends to reduce steady state welfare in a standard life cycle model. However, less is known about the historical effects of the program on agents who were alive when the program was adopted. In a computational life cycle model...

This paper studies the link between rising income uncertainty and household fertility patterns in an Aiyagari-Bewley-Huggett framework augmented to include fertility decisions and infertility risk. Building on Becker and Tomes (1976), I model fertility decisions as sequential, irreversible...