I study the impact of idiosyncratic risk on savings and employment in a small open economy populated by two-member families. Families incur a fixed cost of participation when both members are employed. Because of market incompleteness and information asymmetries, this cost coupled with labor...

We study the endogenous relationship between health care, life expectancy and output in a modified neoclassical growth model. While health care competes resources away from goods production, it prolongs life expectancy which in turn leads to higher capital accumulation. We show that savings and...

We analyze how the presence of endogenous preferences affects the altruistic bequest motive from parents to children. We will show that the existence of habits raises the threshold value of the intergenerational discount factor above which altruistic bequests are positive, while aspiration...

We study how the introduction of consumption externalities affects the efficiency of the dynamic equilibrium in an economy displaying dynastic altruism. When the bequest motive is inoperative consumption externalities affect the intertemporal margin between young and old consumption and thus...

In this paper, we characterize the relationship between the initial distribution of human capital and physical inheritances among individuals and the long-run distribution of these two variables. In a model with indivisible investment in education, we analyze how the initial distribution of...

In the setting of a dynamic general equilibrium model we ask the following question: What happens if the interest rate is settled exogenously in a level that differs from the one which emerges from equilibria in the markets? Although the subject of the setting of the interest rate by an external...

In this paper, we characterize the relationship between the initial distribution of human capital and physical inheritances among individuals and the long-run distri- bution of these two variables. In a model with indivisible investment in education, we analyze how the initial distribution of...

We explore the optimal fertility age-pattern in a four-period OLG economy with physical capital accumulation. For that purpose, we firstly compare the dynamics of two closed economies, Early and Late Islands, which differ only in the timing of births. On Early Island, children are born from...

This paper studies a quantitative general equilibriummodel of the housing market where a large number of overlapping generations of homeowners face both idiosyncratic and aggregate risks but have limited opportunities to insure against these risks due to incomplete financial markets and...

Satiation of need is generally ignored by growth theory. I study a model where consumers may be satiated in any given good but new goods may be introduced. A social planner will never elect a trajectory with long-run satiation. Instead, he will introduce enough new goods to avoid such a...