When infinite-lived agents trade long-lived assets secured by durable goods, equilibrium exists without any additional debt constraints or uniform impatience conditions on agents’ characteristics. Also, price bubbles are absent when physical endowments are uniformly bounded away from zero.

We develop a new approach to the decomposition of income risk within a non- stationary model of intertemporal choice. The approach allows for changes in in- come risk over the life cycle and across the business cycle, allowing for mixtures of persistent and transitory components in the dynamic...

Two key components of the recent U.S. health reform are a new regulation of the individual health insurance market and an increase in income redistribution in the economy. Which component contributes more to the welfare outcome of the reform? We address this question by constructing a general...

The life-cycle patterns of consumption, wage and hours inequality observed in U.S. cross-section data are commonly viewed as incompatible with a Pareto efficient allocation. We determine the extent to which these qualitative and quantitative patterns can or cannot be produced by Pareto efficient...

The financial crisis of 2007 triggered the biggest global recession since the Great Depression. Although economies are gradually becoming more stable and overcoming the initial shock, the effects of the recession are still at work through distortions in savings, the deterioration in the labour...

Pension systems often entail some compulsory saving over which individuals have some degree of choice in terms of the pension plan in which to invest. We analyse whether the choice between alternative plans is affected by the presence of liquidity constraints during working life and we prove...

We study the effects of an annuity market imperfection on individual agents' life-cycle decisions and on the macroeconomic growth rate in an overlapping generations model with single-sector endogenous growth. Our model features both age-dependent mortality and labour productivity. We model...

This paper develops and applies a simple graphical approach to portfolio selection that accounts for covariance between asset returns and an investor's labor income. Our graphical approach easily handles income shocks that are partly hedgable, multiple risky assets, many periods and life cycle...

During the accumulation phase of a defined-contribution pension scheme, a scheme member invests part of their stochastic income in a portfolio of a stock and a bond in order to build up sufficient funds for retirement. It is assumed that the remainder of their salary pre-retirement is consumed,...