Partial equilibrium analysis has a conceptual dilemma that its object should be negligibly small in order to be free from income effect but then the consumer does not care for it and the notion of willingness to pay for it does not make sense. In the setting of a continuum of commodities, we...

The financial crisis of 2008 cut deeply into the retirement savings of most retirees and those who are soon to retire. Add to this the clear trends of longer life expectancies and more active retirements and it becomes clear that portfolios must be structured to minimize the risk of asset...

It has been argued that increased life expectancy raises the rate of return on education, causing a rise in the investment in education followed by an increase in lifetime labor supply. Empirical evidence of these relations is rather weak. Building on a lifecycle model with uncertain longevity,...

The paper explicitly discusses the key differences between a demand for consumables and demand for (non-consumable) credit money. For example, in contrast to consumables, money cannot be demanded by only one agent; it is a stock variable; credit requires special arrangements to implement trust...

We consider a broad class of intertemporal economic problems and we characterize the short and long-run response of the demand for a good to a permanent increase in its market price.Depending on the interplay between self-productivity and time discounting, we show that dynamic substitution...

The cornerstone of mainstream economic theory is the premise of rationality. Humans are assumed to be rational economic agents who, subject to the available information and limited resources, are able to select, among a set of alternatives, the best means to maximize their ends and their...

In this paper, we first provide a brief exposition of the simplest version of the selfish life cycle model or hypothesis, which is undoubtedly the most widely used theoretical model of household behavior in economics, and then survey the literature on household saving behavior in Japan (with...

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) cause about 71% of all deaths globally and a considerable increase in health care costs. To tackle this problem, several Governments have designed "sin taxes", i.e, extra payments related to the quantity of unhealthy contents of specific goods. However, unhealthy...

A multiple-prior decision maker is open-minded if she can describe, as subjective uncertainty, all convex sets of distributions over payoff relevant consequences. Theorem 1: open-mindedness is equivalent to the ability to subjectively describe both the uniform distribution on an interval and the...

This paper theoretically derives a general utility function for inferior goods that accounts for the utility derived from both the quality and the quantity aspects of goods in a model with two substitutable consumption goods. We show the conditions under which a good becomes a normal, an...