This paper employs cohort technique and Consumer Expenditure Survey data to construct average age-profiles of consumption and income over the working lives of typical households across different education and occupation groups. Using these profiles, we estimate a structural model of optimal...

Empirical evidence suggests that it may cost time, effort, and resources to properly implement a saving plan, though such cost may differ across individual consumers. We document seven facts on macroeconomic consumption and saving over the life cycle, and we enrich a simple life-cycle model by...

This paper, using the different alternative methods of dynamic optimization - the Lagrange/Kuhn-Tucker (LKT) method, the substitution method, the Hamiltonian method, and the dynamic programming approach - derives the conditions that must be satisfied by the solution to the so-called Ramsey...

This paper constructs a structural retirement model with hyperbolic preferences and uses it to estimate the effect of several potential Social Security policy changes. Estimated effects of policies are compared using two models, one with hyperbolic preferences and one with standard exponential...

An enhanced version of a structural model jointly explains benefit claiming, wealth and retirement, including reversals from states of lesser to greater work. The model includes stochastic returns on assets. Estimated with Health and Retirement Study data, it does a better job of predicting...

Recent research has shown that the "spirit of capitalism"¡ªa preference for wealth itself, in addition to consumption¡ªhas important implications for growth and asset pricing. This paper explores how the spirit of capitalism affects saving and consumption behavior. We demonstrate that the...

This paper constructs a structural retirement model with hyperbolic preferences and uses it to estimate the effect of several potential policy changes. Estimated effects of policies are compared under hyperbolic and standard exponential preferences. Sophisticated hyperbolic discounters may...

In the literature, econometricians typically assume that household income is the sum of a random walk permanent component and a transitory component, with uncorrelated permanent and transitory shocks. Using data on realized individual incomes and individual expectations of future incomes from...

This paper proposes a new approach for modeling investor fear after rare disasters. The key element is to take into account that investors’ information about fundamentals driving rare downward jumps in the dividend process is not perfect. Bayesian learning implies that beliefs about the...

A continuous-time sequential job search model with savings and CARA preferences is solved analytically without resorting to unlimited borrowing and real-valued consumption. I isolate the effects of limited borrowing and nonnegative consumption as well as risk-aversion on the reservation wage by...