The paper formulates the fertility choice of a representative working woman in the context of a two-period OLG model. The starting point is a young working woman faced with the dilemma of having to simultaneous rear children and participate in the labor force. Discrete variable equivalents of...

We explore intertemporal decision making to test the extent to which elicited discount rates and a self-reported scale of impatience measure the same behavioral characteristic. We conduct experiments in which we elicit discount rates using monetary rewards and a self-reported measure of...

Using the Bank of Italy's Survey of Households Income and Wealth (SHIW) covering a 5-year panel, we measure the impact of the degree of households' financial literacy on the quota of housing investment in their portfolio. We find that households with higher levels of financial literacy hold a...

Since Thaler (1981), we have lived with the uncomfortable stylized fact that many humans choose strictly dominated actions in intertemporal choice experiments. We designed an experiment to probe the reasons for the apparently suboptimal behavior, and we find that the classic Fisher (1930)...

This article examines the extent to which early childhood socioeconomic differences emerge in hyperactivity, impulsivity and persistence, all of which are psychometric analogues to how economists conceptualise time discounting. We control for a wide range of factors including parental investment...

This paper studies the importance of heterogeneous beliefs for the dynamics of asset prices. We focus on currency markets, where the absence of short-selling constraints allows us to perform sharper tests of theoretical predictions. We examine both option and underlying markets, so that we can...

We consider a dynamic allocation problem under alternative insurance and capital market regimes and proper risk aversion separate from intertemporal substitution. We apply the model to study the effect of one-size-fits-all transfers. We find that one-size-fits-all transfers can have different...

Individuals, endowments and trusts face uncertain lifetimes. When the planning horizon of an entity is stochastic and Pareto distributed, hyperbolic discounting and time-varying consumption rates are optimal. We derive expressions for the optimal rate of consumption (draw-down) from wealth for...

This paper solves in closed-form a continuous time model of the nominal and real term structures of interest rates in a monetary economy with habit formation. A crucial property is that, unlike in affine specifications, the price of risk is not a constant multiple of the volatility of interest...

We consider the effect of information on the ex ante average risk-free rate and the equity premium in a standard exchange economy with a representative agent. We show that information always increases the average risk-free rate. Clearly, perfect information eliminates the equity premium;...