We examine economic growth, inequality and education when the wellspring of growth is the formation of human capital through a combination of the quality of child-rearing and formal schooling. The existence of multiple steady states is established, including a poverty trap, wherein children work...

Why does patience vary across individuals and countries? We provide evidence on a widely-hypothesized mechanism, namely that higher longevity fosters patience. Using data on patience for 80,000 individuals in 76 countries, this paper relates exogenous variation in longevity across...

This paper demonstrates that well-established biases in decision making under uncertainty can generate poverty traps. A theoretical framework is developed to demonstrate that: i) probability weighting and ambiguity attitude can lead individuals to erroneously undervalue profitable investments,...

We study the Epstein-Zin model with recursive utility. Recognizing that recursive preferences implies that the underlying model is not Markovian, we use methods not depending upon the Markov property to solve the model. We work with the returns directly, which we approximate by Taylor series...

We consider a sovereign wealth fund that invests broadly in the international financial markets. The influx to the fund has stopped. We adopt the life cycle model and demonstrate that the optimal spending rate from the fund is significantly less than the fund's expected real rate of return. The...

Motivated by the problems of the conventional model in rationalizing market data, we derive the equilibrium interest rate and risk premiums using recursive utility in a continuous-time model. We use the stochastic maximum principle to analyze the model. This method uses forward/backward...

We derive the equilibrium interest rate and risk premiums using recursive utility for jump-diffusions. Compared to to the continuous version, including jumps allows for a separate risk aversion related to jump size risk in addition to risk aversion related to the continuous part. The jump part...

Endogenous time discounting is introduced in a two-period human-capital-driven growth model: subjective discount rate depends upon the level of human capital. This assumption accords strongly with the micro-level evidence. In the model an individual optimizes consumption over two periods. Low...