This paper examines demand systems where the demand for a good depends only on its own price, consumer income, and a single aggregator synthesizing information on all other prices. This generalizes directly-separable preferences where the Lagrange multiplier provides such an aggregator. As...

Older wealthholders spend down assets much more slowly than predicted by classic life-cycle models. This paper introduces health-dependent utility into a model in which preferences for bequests, expenditures when in need of long-term care (LTC), and ordinary consumption combine with health and...

This paper shows that the informativeness principle, as originally formulated by Holmstrom (1979), does not hold if the first-order approach is invalid. We introduce a "generalized informativeness principle" that takes into account non-local incentive constraints and holds generically, even...

What explains how much people work? Going back in time, a main fact to address is the steady reduction in hours worked. The long-run data, for the U.S. as well as for other countries, show a striking pattern whereby hours worked fall steadily by a little below a half of a percent per year,...

Climate change is real and dangerous. Exactly how bad it will get, however, is uncertain. Uncertainty is particularly relevant for estimates of one of the key parameters: equilibrium climate sensitivity—how eventual temperatures will react as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations double....

We develop a demographically-based approach for estimating the utility discount rate (UDR) portion of the Ramsey rule. We show how age-specific mortality rates and life expectancies imply a natural UDR for individuals at each age in a population, and these can be aggregated into a...