Most empirical studies assume only monotonic preferences for households. Behavioral research however providessubstantial evidence that preferences for wealth are measured relative to a reference point. In this paper weintroduce and solve a two-period consumption and savings model for a...

This paper studies the consumption decisions of agents who face costs of acquiring, absorbing and processing information. These consumers rationally choose to only sporadically update their information and re-compute their optimal consumption plans. In between updating dates, they remain...

We present an intertemporal consumption model of consumer investment in financial literacy. Consumers benefit from such investment because their stock of financial literacy allows them to increase the returns on their wealth. Since literacy depreciates over time and has a cost in terms of...

In this paper, we quantitatively analyze to what extent a benevolent government should issue debt in a model where households are subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks, insurance markets are missing and borrowing is restricted. In this environment, issuing government bonds facilitates...

One approach to analyzing inequality is to compare average economic choices from a classical theoretical framework. Another approach considers the impact of the formation of society, through statutes and institutions, on average economic outcomes. This paper studies the effects of slavery on...

We calibrate an incomplete markets large scale OLG model to the US income and wealth distribution and examine the effects of alternative government debt levels and adjustment policies on macroeconomic aggregates and welfare. We find that the government should hold negative debt. Due to the high...

With overlapping generations and heterogeneous risk aversion there is no unique relation between aggregate risk aversion and the real rate of interest, and this type of endogenous “noise” cannot arise in an economy where agents live forever. Our framework accommodates many agent types and...

This paper investigates the role of discount rate heterogeneity for wealth inequality. The key idea is to infer the distribution of preference parameters from the observed age profile of wealth inequality. The contribution of preference heterogeneity to wealth inequality can then be measured...

This paper uses the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to examine pension coverage, estimate Social Security and pension wealth for U.S. households in 1989 and 1992, and to estimate the effects of pension wealth on non-pension net worth. As expected, the SCF data show that including pensions and...

We analyze the distributional effects of monetary policy on income, wealth and consumption. We use administrative household-level data covering the entire population in Denmark over the period 1987-2014 and exploit a long-standing currency peg as a source of exogenous variation in monetary...