This papers develops a theory of intergenerational exchange for generations that are either selfish or have non-dynastic altruism. The main building blocks of the theory are forward and backward intergenerational goods (FIGs and BIGs) and the relationship between them. A FIG is a transfer from...

Time-inconsistent, present-biased agents may hold commitment assets hoping to keep their current and future present bias in check. Paternalistic governments, in an effort to help such people, routinely offer commitment machinery such as restrictions (or bans) on early withdrawals from...

We analyze household stock market participation and allocation in a survey covering 19 European countries. We jointly control for all relevant variables from prior studies, which typically focus on one at a time, and omit risk-aversion. Excellent full model predictive power decomposes into...

Time-inconsistent, present-biased agents may hold commitment assets hoping to keep their current and future present bias in check. Paternalistic governments, in an effort to help such people, routinely offer commitment machinery such as restrictions (or bans) on early withdrawals from...

The so-called retirement-savings puzzle is a phenomenon by which, contrary to what the basic life-cycle model predicts, households do not run down their wealth significantly during retirement. In this survey paper we briefly review the literature that attempts to solve the retirement-savings...

I analyze the inter-vivos transfers and bequest decisions of 700,000 individuals during a period when the decision-maker receives negative news regarding life expectancy. The event that initiates the news is a health outcome. Expected mortality increases both the likelihood of transferring...

We develop a tractable general equilibrium framework of housing and mortgage markets with aggregate and idiosyncratic risks, costly liquidity and strategic defaults, empirically relevant informational asymmetries, and endogenous mortgage design. We show that adverse selection plays an important...

Using account-level administrative data set from a large U.S. financial institution, we assess the impact on consumption and debt repayment of a credit card incentive program that offers cash-back rewards for usage. Using a generalized difference-in-differences design, we find that the program...

In this paper we explore the effects of alternative combinations of fiscal and monetary policies under different income distribution regimes. In particular, we aim at evaluating fiscal rules in economies subject to banking crises and deep recessions. We do so using an agent-based model populated...