Using an optimizing financial planning model in the tradition of Merton and Richard we explore how individuals should determine their life insurance and annuity choices, given uncertainty about investment returns and mortality. Both consumption and bequests appear as arguments in the...

Notional defined contribution (NDC) accounts represent a new model for social security reform that so far has been adopted in seven countries. While NDC schemes remain public, they call for the individual accounts favored by neoliberal policy analysts. NDC schemes would address many of the...

A perennial criticism regarding the use of social media in social science research is the lack of demographic information associated with naturally occurring mediated data such as that produced by Twitter. However the fact that demographics information is not explicit does not mean that it is...

Luxury bequests impart systematic effects of age to an investor's optimal allocation: the expected percentage allocation to equities rises throughout retirement. When bequests are luxuries the marginal utility of bequests declines more slowly than the marginal utility of consumption. This is...

This paper attempts to shed some light on what the incentives are for international participation in 'sub-global' carbon reduction initiatives. We use a six-region global general equilibrium trade and carbon emission model recently used by Whalley and Wigle to analyze the international incidence...

This paper summarises the available evidence on the present-day distribution of wealth in Australia, and draws comparison with international evidence. With this as background, I argue that an initiative to collect more up-to-date information on Australia's wealth distribution would be most...