Does it make us unhappier when we compare our consumptionwith that of the Joneses or our own past achievements? This paper tries ananswer by bringing together two disparate literatures: the macro (growth)theory on habit formation and the applied literature related to the Easterlinparadox. Using...

The fact that members of an immigrant community may have different demographiccharacteristics, or may have different tastes, to the indigenous population, may manifestitself in differences in saving behaviour. In addition, depending on their ethnicbackground, there could be differences among the...

If households and firms face different interest rates, there may be mutual gains in forming seniority wage contracts, which facilitate implicit saving by younger workers, who might otherwise save either little or nothing at all at low interest rates. A three-period OLG model is presented with...

The aim of this study is to examine the underlying dimensions of self-stated attitudesand behaviour concerning everyday financial affairs, and classify individuals basedon those dimensions. A questionnaire was answered by 1282 respondents in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. The sample of...

We prove that for any incomplete market and any concave utilityfunction the marginal propensities to consume and to save are alwayspositive. Furthermore, we introduce a class of incomplete markets thatincludes almost all well known examples of market incompleteness infinance and macroeconomics....

Defined-contribution plans represent a major organizational form for investors´ retirement savings. Today more than one third of all workers are enrolled in 401K plans.(...)

In this paper, I present a theory of dynamic economic growth, business cycles, and asset pricing that integrates (1) Marx's idea (and emphasized by Klein) of a two-class heterogeneity of the ownership structure of physical capital and human capital in a capitalist society, (2) Keynes' idea of...

The large spread between equity returns and risk free rates observed in most stock markets (the "equity premium puzzle") has been subject of intense debates. Two main families of models claim to solve this puzzle: habit formation models and loss aversion models. The goal of this paper is to...

This paper studies the Cass-Koopmans-Ramsey model of optimal economic growth with a representative agent whose preferences for consumption can be gradually varied between the standard CES case and Kahneman and Tversky's prospect utility. The numerical analysis of a specific parametrization shows...

Prospect theory has found an increasing attention in many fields of economics. However, it has scarcely been addressed in a macroeconomic growth model. In an earlier paper we introduced prospect theory into a stochastic growth model. This paper focuses on linking the Euler equation induced by...