Laibson (1997) suggests the present bias problem as one of the driving forces of excessive borrowing. Shefrin and Thaler (1988) suggest that self-control underlies national borrowing/savings rate. We conduct a survey with 65 people between the ages of 21 and 56 to check for present bias as well...

Intertemporal choices involve a great heterogeneity among discount mechanisms. In order to catch such diversity, we introduce an axiomatic Subjective Discounted Utility (SDU) model based on separability assumption. The originality of the SDU model rests on the fact that decision makers discount...

This note extends the characterization of simultaneous investment (tacit collusion) equilibria in Boyer, Lasserre and Moreaux (2012). Tacit collusion equilibria may or may not exist, and when they do may involve either finite time investments (type 1) or infinite delay (type 2). The relationship...

This paper studies the relation between long-term economic growth and time preference of households in the context of a simple model of endogenous growth. We assume that the rate of time preference depends on the level of household's patience (stock of patience capital). It is assumed that the...

This paper models the midlife crisis as a decision on whether and when to realize a life dream, incorporating the key components of three psychology theories of midlife crises. It explains why a crisis (dream realization) tends to occur in the midlife if it occurs at all. Other results include...

The purpose of this paper is to present improved estimates of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) for Japan assuming a constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) utility function. The estimates of the IES we obtain range from 0.2 to 0.5 when we use quarterly consumption data and the...

We develop a simple analytical framework where the longevity of profit-maximizing firms requires costly resources. We show that a firm's longevity and value are positively related to the firm''s pricing power, cash reserves, honesty, and ratio of equity to debt financing.

In this paper, I demonstrate that an expanding variety model of endogenous growth with temporary monopoly power exhibits the indeterminacy of equilibrium paths. This implies the existence of a global range of initial growth rates for any initial level of the state variable.

This paper incorporates asymmetric inter-regional transportation costs into the two-region endogenous growth model in Martin and Ottaviano (1999) to investigate the growth effects of an increase in the cost of transporting goods from the Sough (North) to the North (South). We show that with...

This paper analyzes growth and wealth distribution in a simple AK model in which households are heterogeneous not only in time-preference but in intertemporal substitution. Contrary to the result without long-run growth, the most patient household does not always own the entire capital in an...