Kimball (1990a,b) established that income risk increases the marginal propensity to consume if and only if absolute prudence decreases. We characterize decreasing and increasing multivariate prudence and show that a multidimensional risk increases the marginal propensity to consume if and only...

In this paper, we consider a finite-horizon model with the time-additive utility and the time varying discount rate. With the assumption of the concavity of absolute risk tolerance, the concavity of the consumption function has been proved. This result significantly broadens the conclusion of...

Based on the HRS, I find strong dissaving of nursing home residents and a significant overestimation of U.S. saving rates from age 75 onwards if nursing home residents are excluded as in most micro datasets.

This letter develops a set of simple conditions under which an individual is willing to save an extra amount of money due to the presence of ambiguity concerning his second period wealth. This extra precautionary saving motive is naturally associated with the notion of ambiguity prudence.

This paper provides the closed form solution for the standard model of endogenous growth when consumers have present-biased preferences and make time-inconsistent savings plans, which they revise continuously. It is shown that long-run growth is not necessarily lower under present-biased...

Recent work about risk preferences at the micro level mainly finds that changes in liquid wealth over time do not affect or have a positive effect on the liquid risky asset share. This paper embeds riskless noncapital income in standard portfolio choice models, and shows that exogenous...

We study financial risk taking via standard and sophisticated financial investments. Using survey data on 2,047 individuals, we find that standard investments are strongly associated with both actual and perceived financial literacy for men, but only with actual literacy for women. Sophisticated...

Pension systems often entail some compulsory saving over which individuals have some degree of choice in terms of the pension plan in which to invest. We analyse whether the choice between alternative plans is affected by the presence of liquidity constraints during working life and we prove...

In this note we show the following result of Dybvig (1995) is valid for a general von Neumann–Morgenstern utility function: for an agent who does not tolerate a decline in consumption, the optimal investment out of discretionary wealth (in excess of the perpetuity value of current consumption)...

People have the natural tendency to be optimistic and believe that good outcomes in the future are more likely, but also want to avoid overestimation that could result in bad decision-making. Brunnermeier, Brunnermeier and Parker (2005) and Brunnermeier et al. (2007) established an optimal...