Despite ample empirical evidence on the prevalence of high discount rates among people, applied, quantitative-theoretical macro studies with exponential discounting often assume low positive, or even negative discount rate values. Relying on recent advances from the numerical optimal control...

There is voluminous literature on the reasons behind career interruptions, ranging from maternity leave and organizational layoffs, to national service and human capital acquisition. We show that a standard, neoclassical model of intertemporal consumption/saving and labor/leisure choices without...

We show that the changes in expectations of future income driven by exogenous factors (such as the discovery of oil, an increase in global demand for natural resources, etc.) can cause movements in the real exchange rate (RER) in excess of, and sometimes even in the opposite direction to, what...

This paper studies a continuous-time life-cycle model with a consumption-leisure choice made by a finitely-lived agent with a random lifetime. We explicitly account for the leisure constraint in the corresponding constrained optimal control problem with a commonly postulated solution structure,...