Idiosyncratic labor incomes are typically modeled either by stochastic processes with heterogeneous income profiles (HIPs) or restricted income profiles (RIPs). The HIP assumes that individual labor income grows deterministically at an unobserved rate and contains a persistent but stationary...

This paper uses a heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model to examine the fiscal and distributional consequences of introducing a means test in US Social Security. I find that a means test, that is, conditioning benefit payments on a household's earnings or assets, leads to a higher...

Assets in tax-deferred retirement accounts (TDA) and housing are two major components of household portfolios. In this paper, we develop a life-cycle model to examine the interaction between households' use of TDA and their housing decisions. The model generates life-cycle patterns of home...

This paper specifies and estimates a structural dynamic stochastic model of the way individuals make retirement and saving choices in an uncertain world, and applies that model to analyze the effects of the stock market bubble on retirement behavior. The model includes individual variation both...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

In this paper, we develop a new dynamic programming approach for solving an optimal retirement model in a two-dimensional incomplete market, which is induced by forced unemployment risk and borrowing constraints. We show that the two dimensions jointly affect an individual's optimal consumption,...

The saving ratio of households in Germany has increased in the past few years when the income trend was weak. This could be due to precautionary saving. In this paper, the importance of precautionary saving against income uncertainty is analyzed empirically using micro data from the German...

Modern macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind economic actions by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. This analytical approach requires that incentives of the poor and the rich are strictly aligned. In empirical analysis a...