Survey measures of preference parameters provide a means for accounting for otherwise unobserved heterogeneity.This paper presents measures of relative risk tolerance based on responses to survey questions about hypothetical gambles over lifetime income.It discusses how to impute estimates of...

Labor supply is unresponsive to permanent changes in wage rates. Thus, income and substitution effects cancel, but are they both close to zero or both large? This paper develops a theory of labor supply where income and substitution effects cancel, taking into account optimization over time,...

Economic theory assigns a central role to risk preferences. This paper develops a measure of relative risk tolerance using responses to hypothetical income gambles in the Health and Retirement Study. In contrast to most survey measures that produce an ordinal metric, this paper shows how to...

Individuals' preferences underlying most economic behavior are likely to display substantial heterogeneity. This paper reports on direct measures of preference parameters relating to risk tolerance, time preference, and intertemporal substitution. These experimental measures are based on survey...

This paper develops an overlapping generations model of optimal rebalancing where agents differ in age and risk tolerance. Equilibrium rebalancing is driven by a leverage effect that influences levered and unlevered agents in opposite directions, an aggregate risk tolerance effect that depends...

Access to timely information on consumer spending is important to economic policymakers. The Census Bureau's monthly retail trade survey is a primary source for monitoring consumer spending nationally, but it is not well suited to study localized or short-lived economic shocks. Moreover, lags in...

This paper constructs a dynamic macroeconomic model with less- than-perfect price flexibility which has a real side consistent with Real Business Cycle Theory, augmented by investment adjustment costs, increasing returns to scale, and a new, flexible formalization of imperfect competition. A new...

At least three types of precautionary motives are directly relevant to an agent's demand for assets. (I.) The precautionary saving motive, or prudence, can cause an agent to respond to a risk by accumulating more wealth. (II.) The desire to moderate total exposure to risk, or temperance, can...

The marginal propensity to consume out of wealth is important for evaluating the effects of taxation on consumption, assessing the possibility of multiple equilibria due to aggregate demand spillovers, and explaining observed variations in consumption. It is also a component of the interest...

Efficiency wage models of the effort elicitation type have important implications for labor market dynamics. These models have a wide array of discontinuous sunspot equilibria driven by extraneous variables, in addition to well-behaved equilibria characterized by continuous, slowly adjusting...