Lifetime financial-, work- and health-related decisions made by agents are intertwined with one another. Understanding how these decisions are made is essential to gauge if saving in financial, retirement and human assets is adequate or not. This paper numerically solves, simulates, and...

Near the end of life, health declines, mortality risk increases and curative is replaced by uninsured long-term care, accelerating the fall in wealth. Whereas standard explanations emphasize inevitable aging processes, we propose a com- plementary closing down the shop justification where...

The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is stressing the world population, health care system and economies at a level not experienced since WWII or the last “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918. This shock provides a real-life test of the resilience of human societies, challenging our understanding and...

We present results on the mortality statistics of the COVID-19 epidemic in a number of countries. Our data analysis suggests classifying countries in five groups, 1) Western countries, 2) East Block , 3) developed South East Asian countries, 4) Northern Hemisphere developing countries and 5)...

Richer and healthier agents tend to hold riskier portfolios and spend proportionally less on health expenditures. Potential explanations include health and wealth e ffects on preferences, expected longevity or disposable total wealth. Using HRS data, we perform a structural estimation of a...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...

We investigate the market-compatible degree of agent heterogeneity by identifying and analyzing the full range of conditional beliefs consistent with observed asset prices and good-deal bounds. Our methodology neither makes assumptions on underlying processes nor does it use survey data. It can...

We show how distributions can be reduced to low-dimensional scenario trees. Applied to intertemporal distributions, the scenarios and their probabilities become time-varying factors. From S&P 500 options, two or three time-varying scenarios suffice to forecast returns, implied variance or...

Convex duality for two two different super-replication problems in a continuous time financial market with proportional transaction cost is proved. In this market, static hedging in a finite number of options, in addition to usual dynamic hedging with the underlying stock, are allowed. The first...

Most firms face some form of competition in product markets. The degree of competition a firm faces feeds back into its cash flows and affects the values of the securities it issues. Through its effects on stock prices, product market competition affects the prices of options on equity and...