This paper analyses the effect of individual risk aversion and time preference on cross-border commuting and migration intentions. Both the theoretical and empirical results show that the probability of being willing to migrate decreases with risk aversion, the rate of time preference, and the...

This paper provides a theoretical analysis regarding the rationality of suicide attacks from an economist’s point of view. It is argued that although a terrorist gives up future utility from consumption by committing a suicide attack, this loss can be overcompensated by the utility he derives...

The prevailing literature discusses intergenerational trade-offs predominantly in infinitely-lived agent models despite the finite lifetime of individuals. We discuss these trade-offs in a continuous time OLG framework and relate the results to the infinitely-lived agent setting. We identify...

An axiomatic construction for lifecycle preferences accounting for the finiteness and the randomness of life duration is provided. We emphasize the role of intertemporal correlation aversion and explain why multiplica- tive preferences provide an interesting alternative to additive preferences,...

On the basis of a concatenation of fifteen Belgian household budget surveys from 1995/96 to 2010, we investigate the impact of demographic factors, such as ageing and changing household composition, on saving behaviour. Not focusing on high frequency events (e.g. business cycles and unexpected...

The term premium on nominal long-term bonds in the standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used in macroeconomics is far too small and stable relative to empirical measures obtained from the data - an example of the "bond premium puzzle." However, in models of endowment...

In this paper we use Pindyck's model (2002) to show that the discount rate may play an important role in explaining for the income-pollution pattern observed in the real world. Low levels of income involve high values of discount rate, that are obstacles to the adoption of a pollution abatement...