On average, "young" people underestimate whereas "old" people overestimate their chances to survive into the future. We adopt a Bayesian learning model of ambiguous survival beliefs which replicates these patterns. The model is embedded within a non-expected utility model of life-cycle...

We define pessimistic, respectively optimistic, investors as CEU (Choquet expected utility) decision makers who update their pessimistic, respectively optimistic, beliefs according to a pessimistic (Dempster-Shafer), respectively optimistic, update rule. This paper then demonstrates that, in...

Abel (2002) proposes a resolution of the riskfree rate and the equity premium puzzles by considering pessimism and doubt. Pessimism is characterized by subjective probabilistic beliefs about asset returns that are stochastically dominated by the objective distribution of these returns. The...

Psychological evidence suggests that people’s learning behavior is often prone to a “myside bias†or “irrational belief persistence†in contrast to learning behavior exclusively based on objective data. In the context of Bayesian learning such a bias may result in...

We define pessimistic, respectively optimistic, investors as CEU (Choquet expected utility) decision makers who update their pessimistic, respectively optimistic, beliefs according to a pessimistic (Dempster-Shafer), respectively optimistic, update rule. This paper then demonstrates that, in...

This paper develops a theoretical model for the formation of subjective beliefs on individual survival expectations. Data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) indicate that, on average, young respondents underestimate their true sur- vival probability whereas old respondents overestimate...

Public pensions – the primary pillar of old-age income provision – will, in the future, be less generous than they have been in the past, in particular owing to the impact of demographic change. The pension gap is supposed to be plugged by the second and third pillars of pension...

This paper employs a large scale overlapping generations (OLG) model with endogenous education to evaluate the quantitative role of human capital adjustments for the economic consequences of demographic change. We find that endogenous human capital formation is an important adjustment mechanism...

This paper investigates extensions of the method of endogenous grid-points (ENDGM) introduced by Carroll (2006) to higher dimensions with more than one continuous endogenous state variable. We compare three different categories of algorithms: (i) the conventional method with exogenous grids...