This paper reports on experimental tests of an instantiation of the Lucas asset pricing model with heterogeneous agents and time-varying private income streams. Central features of the model (infinite horizon, perishability of consumption, stationarity) present difficult challenges and require a...

This paper presents a complete, choice-based, axiomatic Bayesian decision theory. It introduces a new choice set consisting of information-contingent plans for choosing actions and bets and subjective expected utility model with effect-dependent utility functions and action-dependent subjective...

This paper studies the importance of social interactions for the adoption of financial products. We exploit a unique dataset of friendships among United States students and a novel estimation strategy that accounts for possibly endogenous network formation. We find that not all social contacts...

Much of the lending in modern economies is secured by some form of collateral; residential and commercial mortgages and corporate bonds are familiar examples. This paper builds an extension of general equilibrium theory that incorporates durable goods, collateralized securities and the...

If voters of different countries adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms, when these countries interact their leaders may find it impossible to agree on efficient policies especially in hard times. Political leaders' actions are bound by a "conformity constraint" that requires them...

A notable feature of post-World War II civil wars is their very long average duration. We provide a theory of the persistence of civil wars. The civilian government can successfully defeat rebellious factions only by creating a relatively strong army. In weakly-institutionalized polities this...

Household finance - the normative and positive study of how households use financial markets to achieve their objectives - has gained a lot of attention over the past decade and has become a field with its own identity, style and agenda. In this chapter we review its evolution and most recent...

Using a representative sample of Italian investors, we estimate the risk associated with pension benefits by eliciting for each individual the subjective distribution of the replacement rate as a summary indicator of social security wealth. We find substantial heterogeneity of pension risk and...

We investigate the determinants of firms’ implicit employment and wage insurance to employees against industry-level and idiosyncratic shocks. We rely on differences between family and nonfamily firms to identify the supply of insurance, and between national public insurance programs to gauge...

Speculators often advertise arbitrage opportunities in order to persuade other investors and thus accelerate the correction of mispricing. This induces under-diversification: a risk-averse arbitrageur will optimally advertise only one of several mispriced assets, and overweigh it in his...