Why do some people think they will behave differently in the future? Building on research on dynamic inconsistency and age related preferences, this paper introduces the concept that inconsistent intertemporal preferences are directly related to age. In previous studies, standard socioeconomic...

Why do some people think they will behave differently in the future? Building on research on dynamic inconsistency and age related preferences, this paper introduces the concept that inconsistent intertemporal preferences are directly related to age. In previous studies, standard socioeconomic...

Since Thaler (1981), we have lived with the uncomfortable stylized fact that many humans choose strictly dominated actions in intertemporal choice experiments. We designed an experiment to probe the reasons for the apparently suboptimal behavior, and we find that the classic Fisher (1930)...

The evidence strongly suggests a robust negative relationship between income and fertility, and a positive relationship between income and longevity. This is puzzling for standard dynamic models. For instance, altruistic models that use the most standard preferences in macro --time separable...

The paper discusses the importance of decreasing mortality in explaining demographic change over the last century. A two-sex overlapping generations model is used where care both for children and the elderly is modeled. Assuming that the main costs of care are tied to time use (and thereby...

Households' and firms' subjective inflation expectations play a central role in macroeconomic and intertemporal microeconomic models. We discuss how subjective inflation expectations are measured, the patterns they display, their determinants, and how they shape households' and firms' economic...

We provide a concise introduction to a household-panel data infrastructure that provides the international research community with longitudinal data of private households in Germany since 1984: the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We demonstrate the comparative strength of the SOEP data in...

The paper discusses the importance of decreasing mortality in explaining demographic change over the last century. A two-sex overlapping generations model is used where care both for children and the elderly is modeled. Assuming that the main costs of care are tied to time use (and thereby...

This paper provides a preliminary investigation into the lifetime cost of children upon a household's lifetime wealth. By comparing the lifetime cost function of a household with children compared to the lifetime cost function of a household without children, an intertemporal equivalence scale...

This study estimates the adequacy of retirement wealth of pre-retirement households using a 1995 national sample of households. Retirement wealth is projected using planned retirement age and portfolio allocation. Retirement needs are estimated from expenditure functions, and 52% of the...