This paper uses a heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model to examine the fiscal and distributional consequences of introducing a means test in US Social Security. I find that a means test, that is, conditioning benefit payments on a household's earnings or assets, leads to a higher...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

Although rational consumers without bequest motives are better oÞ investing exclusively with annuitized instruments in partial equilibrium, we demonstrate the welfare effect of annuitization is ambiguous in general equilibrium on account of the pecuniary externality. Accidental bequests improve...

In the present paper an empirical analysis will point out that government debt as a percentage of GDP has a negative impact (among others) on banking profitability. This impact will be even worse when this debt as a percentage of GDP exceeds a certain critical level. The sample covers during the...

In this paper, we develop a new dynamic programming approach for solving an optimal retirement model in a two-dimensional incomplete market, which is induced by forced unemployment risk and borrowing constraints. We show that the two dimensions jointly affect an individual's optimal consumption,...

I study optimal consumption and investment for retirement in an economic environment where an individual has retirement flexibility and borrowing constraints. I show that Friedman's (1957) permanent income hypothesis (PIH) is generalized with retirement and constrained borrowing against future...

This paper analyzes panic buying of storable consumer goods, using a novel macroeconomic model of consumers' inventory adjustment featuring search frictions in shopping. Even if consumers are fully rational, an anticipated temporary increase in consumer shopping costs (caused by a disaster...

We study the consumption and portfolio selection problem of an agent who faces consumption irreversibility: there is disutility from changing consumption levels. The derived preference exhibits intertemporal loss aversion toward consumption changes with the previous consumption level being the...

This paper studies how "rational inattention (RI)" -- a type of information processing constraint proposed by Sims (2003) -- affects the joint dynamics of consumption and income in a permanent income model with general income processes. Specifically, I propose an analytical approach to solve the...