Standard real business cycle (RBC) theory assumes that changes in economic conditions are unanticipated. We argue that upcoming changes are often well anticipated. Employing the RBC methodology to evaluate models when changes in economic conditions are fully anticipated provides evidence on the...

In this paper, we develop a measure of household resources that converts total financial, nonfinancial, and annuitized assets into an expected annual amount of wealth per person in retirement. We use this measure, which we call "annualized comprehensive wealth," to investigate spend-down...

This paper shows that negative comovements between major macroeconomic variables at business-cycle frequencies are commonly observed, but that standard Real Business Cycle (RBC) theory fails to predict this feature of the data. We show that allowing for ``anticipation effects'' in response to...

The deterministic extended-path method for solving dynamic stochastic optimization problems approximates conditional expectations instead of approximating a model's complex non-linear dynamics. We show that this straightforward approach provides similar accuracy to the best results reported for...

We show that the deterministic Extended-Path (EP) method of Fair and Taylor (1983) solves standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with similar accuracy to the best results reported in the literature for alternative methods. The EP method demands more computer time than other...

This paper points out that negative comovements between macroeconomic aggregates are commonly observed in US data and that this is not explained by conventional business cycle models which emphasize positive comovements only. We discuss how these facts can be readily explained in simple...

This paper investigates the impact of demographic shocks on optimal decisions about saving, life insurance, and, most centrally, asset allocation. We analyze these choices within the framework of a life-cycle model that features exogenous changes in family composition, heterogeneity in lifetime...

Previous studies find a strong and positive empirical connection between health status and the share of risky assets held in household portfolios. But is this relationship truly causal, in the sense that households respond to changes in health by altering their portfolio allocation, or does it...

We examine the current wealth adequacy of older U.S. households using the 1998-2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We find that the median older U.S. household is reasonably well situated, with a ratio of comprehensive net wealth to present value poverty- line wealth of about...

Defined benefit (DB) pension freezes in large healthy firms such as Verizon and IBM, as well as terminations of plans in the struggling steel and airline industries, highlight the fact that these traditional pensions cannot be viewed as risk-free promises from the employeeÂ’s perspective....