We analyze the returns to education in a life-cycle framework that incorporates risk preferences, earnings volatility (including unemployment), and a progressive income tax and social insurance system. We show that such a framework significantly reduces the measured gains from education relative...

A rapidly growing public policy concern facing the United States is whether future generations of retired Americans, particularly those in the Baby Boomer and Gen X cohorts, will have adequate retirement incomes. There have been several policy studies in recent years that suggest that the...

Using trading data from Finland and the US, I empirically show that investors tend to buy riskier stocks following realized losses. The measure of risk that the investors seem to pay attention to is the market beta of a stock. This behavior of buying higher beta stocks after a realized loss is...

To attract time deposits, more than 6,000 banks post their offer rates. I document a large cross-sectional dispersion, negative spreads over Treasuries, and upward rigid adjustments in these rates following federal funds rate increases. Estimates of an oligopoly model reveal a large fraction of...

I solve an overlapping generations model with stochastic birth and death rates in general equilibrium. I provide sufficient conditions so that the interest rate is decreasing in the birth and increasing in the death rate. If preferences are non-time-separable, stochastic changes in birth and...

This paper studies the empirical relevance of temptation and self-control using household-level data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We estimate an infinite-horizon consumption-savings model that allows, but does not require, temptation and self-control in preferences. To help identify the...

This paper challenges the view that alternative consumption measures (garbage, fourth quarter, unfiltered consumption) can address the shortcomings of consumption-based asset pricing. When the CRRA model is confronted with the cross-section of asset returns and the risk-free rate volatility, the...

We propose a single-factor asset pricing model based on an indicator function of consumption growth being less than its endogenous certainty equivalent. This certainty equivalent is derived from generalized disappointment aversion preferences, and it is located approximately one standard...

We explicitly solve for the aggregate asset prices in a discrete-time general-equilibrium endowment economy with two agents who differ with respect to their preferences for risk aversion and sensitivity to habit, either internal or external. We compute equilibrium quantities -- equity premium,...

I propose a consumption-based asset pricing model with disappointment aversion to investigate the link between downside consumption risk and expected returns across asset markets. I find that the disappointment model can explain 95% of the cross-sectional variation in size/book-to-market...