It has been argued that hyperbolic discounting of future gains and losses leads to time-inconsistent behavior and thereby, in the context of health economics, not enough investment in health and too much indulgence of unhealthy consumption. Here, we challenge this view. We set up a life-cycle...

Married people live longer than singles but how much of the longevity differential is causal and what the particular mechanisms are is not fully understood. In this paper we propose a new approach, based on counterfactual computational experiments, in order to asses how much of the marriage gap...

Recent empirical research has shown that output and GDP per capita in the aftermath of natural disasters are not necessarily lower than before the event. In many cases, both are not significantly affected and, surprisingly, sometimes they are found to respond positively to natural disasters....

Married people live longer than singles but how much of the longevity gap is causal and what the particular mechanisms are is not fully understood. In this paper we propose a new approach, based on counterfactual computational experiments, in order to asses how much of the marriage gap can be...

Macroeconomic studies of tax policy in dynamic general equilibrium usually assume that reforms hit the economy unexpectedly and last forever. Here, we explore how previous results change when we allow policy changes to be pre-announced and of finite duration and when these facts are anticipated...

The anticipation of bad future events reduces currently experienced happiness and it may through this channel elicit detrimental behavioral responses. We explore this idea in the context of endogenous health and aging. We integrate physiological aging into a life-cycle model, calibrate it with...