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...

We show that a steeply increasing workload before a deadline is compatible with time-consistent preferences. The key departure from the literature is that we consider a stochastic environment where success of effort is not guaranteed.

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.

We study multivariate prevention decisions by disentangling early and late prevention. We show how the modularity of prevention and several measures of prevention efficiency interact with the agent’s risk attitude. We derive comparative statics with respect to impatience, loss severity, and...

The 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act limited homestead exemptions and imposed means test to discourage petitioners seeking financial benefits. We find that these restrictions were effective in steering petitioners away from Chapter 7 filings and into Chapter 13.

We find that most husbands claim Social Security before the ages that maximize the expected present value of their benefits. Although household benefits are only slightly reduced, the expected present value of widows’ benefits reduces by 17.7%, increasing their risk of poverty.

We study how taxes and subsidies affect portfolio choices in a laboratory experiment. We find highly significant differences after intervention, even though the net income is identical in all our treatments and thus the decision pattern of investors should be constant. In particular, we observe...

This paper investigates the association between unrealised financial expectations (over-optimism) and subsequent mortgage repayment difficulties, using British longitudinal data. Evidence is provided that an increased probability of mortgage payment difficulties post committal is associated with...

This letter revisits the question of how wealth shocks influence retirement behaviour, exploiting the dramatic changes in UK asset prices between 2008 and 2009 as a source of such shocks. We find no evidence that the wealth shocks arising from this recent financial crisis affected the retirement...

Using a uniquely defined indicator of political ideology we test whether expectations of future financial well-being have an effect on an individual’s position on the political ‘left–right’ spectrum. We find evidence of a significant “prospect of upward mobility” effect.