The mortgage payoff dilemma affects many retirees that have enough financial assets to pay off their mortgage. I find that, on average, retirees with less than $300,000 in non-housing financial wealth are better off keeping the mortgage and investing.

We build a microsimulation model to monitor the financial vulnerability of Italian households. Starting from household-level data from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth and matching them with macroeconomic forecasts on debt and income, we project the future path of households’...

We build a microsimulation model to monitor the financial vulnerability of Italian households. Starting from household-level data from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth and matching them with macroeconomic forecasts on debt and income, we project the future path of households’...

This paper presents a life-cycle model with earnings risk, liquidity constraints, and portfolio choice over tax-deferred and taxable assets to evaluate changes to household consumption in response to transitory, anticipated income shocks, such as the 2001 federal income tax rebate. Households...

A nonlinear programming formulation is introduced to solve infinite horizon dynamic programming problems. This extends the linear approach to dynamic programming by using ideas from approximation theory to avoid inefficient discretization. Our numerical results show that this nonlinear...