We analyze the effect of means-tested benefits on annuitization decisions. Most industrialized countries provide a subsistence level consumption floor in old age, usually in the form of means-tested benefits. The availability of such means-tested payments creates an incentive to cash out...

We bring together the theories of duality and dynamic programming. We show that the dual of an additively separable dynamic optimization problem can be recursively decomposed using summaries of past Lagrange multipliers as state variables. Analogous to the Bellman decomposition of the primal...

A dominant firm undertakes a given business practice that is regulated by an antitrust enforcer by the choice of a legal standard, fines and accuracy. In traditional industries the incumbent and technology are already established, while in innovative industries the successful innovator becomes...

Banks provide credit and take deposits. Whereas a high price in the credit market increases banks’ retained earnings and attracts more deposits, it reduces lending if borrowers are sufficiently poor to be tempted by diversion. Thus optimal bank market structure trades off the benefits of...

We propose to bring together two conceptually complementary ideas: (1) selfconfi?rming equilibrium (SCE): at a rest point of learning dynamics in a game played recurrently, agents best respond to confi?rmed beliefs, i.e. beliefs consistent with the evidence they accumulate, and (2) ambiguity...

The current account has always been a neglected variable in the management of the Euro area and in the assessment of its members' performance; so has, as a consequence, the savings-investment balance. This paper first reviews the arguments that explain this attitude and justify, under some...

Financial systems are inherently fragile because of the very function which makes them valuable: liquidity transformation. Thus regulatory reforms, as urgent and desirable as they are, will definitely strengthen the financial system and decrease the risk of liquidity crises, but they will never...

We consider decision makers that know that payo¤ relevant observations are generated by a process that belongs to a given class M, as postulated in Wald [33]. We incorporate this Waldean piece of objective information within an otherwise subjective setting a la Savage [30] and show that this...

Do childhood events shape adult political views and behavior? This paper investigates the impact of Fourth of July celebrations in the US during childhood on partisanship and participation later in life. Using daily precipitation data to proxy for exogenous variation in participation on Fourth...