Japanese public pension benefits, which were distributed quarterly through February 1990 and every other month since then, induce substantial but predictable income fluctuations. The relative magnitude of the payments combined with the delay between payments yields a stronger test of the...

Many observers believe current aging baby boomers are woefully unprepared for retirement. Others raise the prospect that Americans are saving too much for retirement. This paper attempts to reconcile these contrasting views using a simple life cycle model and a more sophisticated retirement...

I study how children affect the marginal utility of non-durable consumption. I estimate by Maximum Likelihood a structural economic model of optimal intertemporal allocation of consumption in the presence of children using high quality Danish administrative longitudinal data. Contrary to...

I show that conventional estimators based on the consumption Euler equation, extensively used in studies of intertemporal consumption behavior, produce inconsistent estimates of the effect of children on consumption if potentially binding credit constraints are ignored. As a more constructive...