Hyperbolic discounting with naiveté is widely believed to provide a better explanation than exponential discounting of why people borrow so much and why they wait so long to save for retirement. We reach a different set of conclusions. We show that if financial planning is enriched to include...

I incorporate expectations-based reference-dependent preferences into a dynamic stochastic model to explain three major life-cycle consumption facts; the intuitions behind these three implications constitute novel connections between recent advances in behavioral economics and prominent ideas in...

We present a rule-of-thumb consumption model with participation in a Save More Tomorrow (SMarT) plan, and we analytically derive the fraction of life-cycle wage increases that must be saved to offset a reduction in social security benefits resulting from an aging population (holding taxes fixed...

I describe and compare sources of data on citations in economics and the statistics that can be constructed from them. Constructing data sets of the post-publication citation histories of articles published in the "Top 5" journals in the 1970s and the 2000s, I examine distributions and life...

I describe and compare sources of data on citations in economics and the statistics that can be constructed from them. Constructing data sets of the post-publication citation histories of articles published in the "Top 5" journals in the 1970s and the 2000s, I examine distributions and life...

We are the first to examine how parental unemployment experienced during early-, mid- and late-childhood affects adult life satisfaction. Using German household panel data, we find that parental unemployment induced by plant closures and experienced during early (0-5 years) and late (11-15...

This paper tests whether young and adult smokers have different time preferences, in particular with respect to time consistency. The recent introduction of Tobacco 21 law in the US were in part motivated by allegedly inconsistent time preferences of the young consumers. This research...

This paper suggests a solution to what has become known as the private equity premium puzzle (Moskowitz and Vissing-Jorgensen (2002)). We interpret occupational choice as a dynamic portfolio choice problem of a life-cycle investor facing a liquidity constraint and imperfect information about the...

This paper uses a structural model to address the question of why home-owners with large mortgage debt work longer hours than those without such debt. We consider whether this is due to lower net wealth or to capital market imperfections, including mortgage constraints that depend on current...

The adequacy of household saving for retirement has become a policy issue all around the world. The UK and US have been in the vanguard of those countries that have tried to encourage retirement saving by providing tax-favoured treatment for particular savings accounts. We consider empirical...