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...

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...

A new laboratory experiment is designed to identify the best theories for describing decisions under risk. The experimental design has two noteworthy features: a representative sample of binary choice problems (for fair comparison across theories) and a lottery set with a small number of...

This study establishes necessary conditions for Almost Stochastic Dominance criteria of various orders. These conditions take the form of restrictions on algebraic combinations of moments of the probability distributions in question. The relevant set of conditions depends on the relevant order...

We quantify the welfare gains from better retirement planning using a model in which retirement planning is time inconsistent. A modest increase in a household’s planning horizon by just a few years generates large aggregate and individual welfare gains.

With a longer life expectancy, individuals who plan to work when they are old may increase the number of their children. Therefore, when individuals choose the time of retirement, the fertility rate may not necessarily decline but even rise.

In this paper we propose a new strategy for comparing the behavior of a hyperbolic discounter who possesses self-control problems to an exponential discounter who does not. Our strategy controls for inherent differences in overall levels of impatience across discount functions, which thereby...