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.

While most of the literature explaining the change in consumption composition has focused on the role of relative prices and non-homothetic preferences, this paper examines the importance of preference shifts. I introduce dynamics in preferences and find that they play a relevant role and that...

With moral hazard and anonymous asset trade, first-order conditions need not characterize effort and portfolio choices. The standard procedure for establishing validity of the first-order approach in economies with one hidden asset is not fruitful when multiple assets are hidden.

This paper identifies a new sufficient condition for a prudent agent to have positive precautionary saving in the presence of labor income and interest rate risks of any size. We also provide three economic interpretations for this condition focusing respectively on the marginal effect of saving...

Analytical expectational stability results are obtained for both Euler-equation and infinite-horizon adaptive learning in a simple stochastic growth model. The rational expectations equilibrium is stable under both types of learning, though there are important differences in the learning dynamics.

This paper investigates nonlinear effects of government debt on private consumption. The estimated consumption function shows smooth regime switching depending on the debt-to-GDP ratio, and a higher level of government debt crowds out private consumption to a greater extent.

This paper derives closed-form and numerical solutions for relative risk aversion in a standard consumption-based model enriched with housing. The presence of housing enables the household to hedge against unexpected shocks and may decrease relative risk aversion. In addition, housing may...

We study how estimators that are used to impute consumption in survey data are inconsistent due to measurement error in consumption. Previous research suggests instrumenting consumption to overcome this problem. We show that, if additional regressors are present, then instrumenting consumption...

Recent work by Laibson (1997) identifies that individuals’ time discount factors evolve over time. This leads to a time-inconsistency problem in which savings are distorted. This paper studies the long-run effects of inflation in the presence of a time-inconsistency problem.

We test the relation between income and democracy during the postwar period. We employ panel estimation methods that explicitly allow for the fact that the primary measures of democracy are censored with substantial mass at the boundaries. We find that the statistically significant positive...