Lifetime financial-, work- and health-related decisions made by agents are intertwined with one another. Understanding how these decisions are made is essential to gauge if saving in financial, retirement and human assets is adequate or not. This paper numerically solves, simulates, and...

Near the end of life, health declines, mortality risk increases and curative is replaced by uninsured long-term care, accelerating the fall in wealth. Whereas standard explanations emphasize inevitable aging processes, we propose a com- plementary closing down the shop justification where...

Richer and healthier agents tend to hold riskier portfolios and spend proportionally less on health expenditures. Potential explanations include health and wealth e ffects on preferences, expected longevity or disposable total wealth. Using HRS data, we perform a structural estimation of a...

This paper studies the lifetime effects of exogenous changes in health insurance coverage (e.g. Medicare, PPACA, termination of employer-provided plans) on the dynamic optimal allocation (consumption, leisure, health expenditures), status (health, wealth and survival rates), and welfare. We...

Evidence on adverse selection in slave markets remains inconclusive. We study this question through notarial acts on public slave auctions in Mauritius between 1825 and 1835, involving 4,286 slaves. In addition to slave characteristics, the acts document the identities of buyers and sellers. We...

According to standard theory, wealth should have no intrinsic value. Yet, conventional wisdom, recent theories, and data suggest it might. We verify whether or not households have direct preferences over wealth in selecting assets. The fully structural econometric model focuses on a multivariate...

This paper proposes a new wealth-dependent utility function for the inter-temporal consumption and portfolio problem, in which the reference (bliss) consumption level is a function of wealth. Ratchet effects obtain when higher wealth increases the reference consumption level; blase behavior...

We propose a consumption-based capital asset pricing model in which the representative agent's preferences display state-dependent risk aversion. We obtain a valuation equation in which the vector of excess returns on equity includes both consumption risk as well as the risk associated with...