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...

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...

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...

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...

We develop a simple overlapping generations model to analytically show that population aging leads to increased educational efforts through a general equilibrium effect. The key mechanism at work in the model is that scarcity of raw labor increases the rate of return to human capital relative to...

This paper employs a large scale overlapping generations (OLG) model with endogenous human capital formation using a Ben-Porath (1967) technology to evaluate the quantitative role of human capital adjustments for the economic consequences of demographic change. We find that endogenous human...

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...