Deviating from conventional models in financial economics which maintain that markets are perfectly informed, more recent work has relied on the role of private information to explain observed portfolio choices or their impact on market outcomes in financial and currency markets (see, e.g.,...

Considerable attention has been devoted in the financial literature to excessive portfolio concentrations in domestic risky assets relative to those predicted by standard finance models – generally identified as “home bias” – across international markets. The innovation we offer is...

The problem of the uninsured – those eschewing the purchase of health insurance policies – cannot be fully understood without considering informal alternatives to market insurance called "self-insurance" and "self-protection", including the publicly and charitably-financed safety-net health...

The problem of the uninsured cannot be fully understood without considering the role of non-market alternatives to 'market insurance' called 'self-insurance' and 'self-protection' (SISP), including the public 'health care safety-net' system. We tackle the problem by formulating a...

Unlike physical capital, human capital has both embodied and disembodied dimensions. It can be perceived of as skill and acquired knowledge, but also as knowledge spillover effects between overlapping generations and across different skill groups within and across countries. We illustrate the...

This paper reexamines the issues of compliance with and enforcement of the minimum wage law recently addressed in this Journal by Ashenfelter and Smith and by Grenier. Pursuing a more rigorous methodology we are able to add new general conclusions, and correct and reconcile some previous...

In this paper we solve the stochastic portfolios-consumption control problem under the assumption that individuals follow precommitment strategies over finite intervals of time. This precommitment approach is an alternative to Merton's (1969) continuous-time stochastic dynamic control problem...

To what extent can life protection account for observed diversities in age-specific life expectancies across individuals and over time? We provide answers via calibrated simulations of a life-cycle model where life's end is stochastic, and age-specific mortality hazards are ndogenous outcomes of...

There is growing concern about a decline in the total fertility rate worldwide, but nowhere is the concern greater than in OECD countries, some of which already face the prospect of population decline as well. While the trend is largely the result of structural economic and social changes, our...