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...

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...

This paper derives the general equilibrium effects of rational inattention (or RI; Sims 2003, 010) in a model of incomplete income insurance (Huggett 1993, Wang 2003). We first show that, under the assumption of CARA utility with Gaussian shocks, the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) arises in...

We investigate the dynamic consumption and portfolio selection problem of an agent who has an intertemporal preference with loss and risk aversion, as proposed by Choi et al. (2019a). We disentangle the effects of loss aversion from those of risk aversion on risk taking. We show by simulation...

We propose a recursive utility version of a basic Huggett (1993) model to study the implications of rational inattention (or RI, Sims 2003, 2010) for the cross-sectional dispersion of consumption and wealth (relative to income) in general equilibrium. We find that incorporating RI can...

The present paper tests for the existence of multicointegration between real per capita private consumption expenditure and real per capita disposable personal income in the USA. In doing so, we exploit the fact that the flows of disposable income and consumption expenditure on the one hand, and...

Recessions often have detrimental effects on both employment and equity returns, forcing individuals to make decisions about how to balance risks to their labor and capital income. In this paper, we study how individuals allocate their limited attention between capital income and labor income...

We use a new panel dataset of credit card accounts to analyze how consumers responded to the 2001 federal income tax rebates. We estimate the monthly response of credit card payments, spending, and debt, exploiting the unique, randomized timing of the rebate disbursement. We find that on average...