I derive a social planner's optimal information design in an environment with quasi-hyperbolic discounting consumers without commitment. Consumption induces instantaneous utility, but unknown delayed cost. Consumers may or may not acquire additional costless information on the cost parameter....

The question of how to discount the distant future has long been at the core of climate economics. It has also divided economists. Some argue for prescriptivist approaches to discounting, often calling for social discount rates of as low as 1% per year. Others argue strongly for descriptivist...

The question of how to discount the distant future has long been at the core of climate economics. It has also divided economists. Some argue for prescriptivist approaches to discounting, often calling for social discount rates of as low as 1% per year. Others argue strongly for descriptivist...

An axiomatic construction for lifecycle preferences accounting for the finiteness and the randomness of life duration is provided. We emphasize the role of intertemporal correlation aversion and explain why multiplicative preferences provide an interesting alternative to additive preferences,...

The standard model of intertemporal choice assumes risk neutrality toward the length of life: due to additivity, agents are not sensitive to a mean preserving spread in the length of life. Using a survey fielded in the RAND American Life Panel (ALP), this paper provides empirical evidence on...

This paper focuses on the estimation of the importance of the precautionary motive in the wealth accumulation decision. We use a micro dataset containing information on wealth, a subjective measure of income uncertainty and subjective indicators of risk aversion. The latter makes us possible to...

We present results from a laboratory study of loss aversion in the context of intertemporal choice. We investigate whether the provision of (windfall) endowments results in different elicited discount rates relative to subjects who earn income or earn and retain the income for a period before...

People’s value for their own time is a key input in evaluating public policies: evaluations should account for time taken away from work or leisure as a result of policy. Using rich choice data collected from farming households in western Kenya, we show that households exhibit non-transitive...