A major challenge in the study of saving behavior is how to disentangle different motives for saving. We approach this question in the context of an entire life-cycle model. Specifically, we identify the importance of different saving motives by simultaneously accounting for wealth accumulation...

What are the cumulative effects of health shocks over the life-cycle? The answer depends on the nature of persistence of bad health and the extent to which it changes individuals' economic circumstances. We measure the lifetime costs of bad health using a rich structural model that can reproduce...

What are the cumulative effects of health shocks over the life-cycle? The answer depends on the nature of persistence of bad health and the extent to which it changes individuals' economic circumstances. We measure the lifetime costs of bad health using a rich structural model that can reproduce...

Health shocks are an important source of risk. People in bad health work less, earn less, face higher medical expenses, die earlier, and accumulate much less wealth compared to those in good health. Importantly, the dynamics of health are much richer than those implied by a low-order Markov...

To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average over adulthood. We here use two British birth-cohort datasets (the 1958 NCDS and the 1970 BCS)...