Whether couples pool their resources and behave like a unit or spend their income individually is crucial for social and tax policy. In this paper, I provide a test of the income pooling hypothesis using administrative cross-sectional survey data on expenditures and individual incomes of couple...

Exploiting the natural experiment of the German reunification, we examine how consumers adapt to a new environment in their macroeconomic forecasting. We document that East Germans expect higher inflation and make larger forecast errors than West Germans even decades after reunification....

Exploiting the natural experiment of the German reunification, we examine how consumers adapt to a new environment in their macroeconomic forecasting. We document that East Germans expect higher inflation and make larger forecast errors than West Germans even decades after reunification....

Whether couples pool their resources and behave like a unit or spend their income individually is crucial for social and tax policy. In this paper, I provide a test of the income pooling hypothesis using administrative cross-sectional survey data on expenditures and individual incomes of couple...

This paper presents evidence on the impact of political regimes on time preferences using survey measures of present bias and patience. Treating the German separation and reunification as a natural experiment, our results indicate that the GDR's socialist regime significantly diminished the...

We analyze life-cycle saving strategies with a recursive model that is designed to provide reasonable positive values for the value of a statistical life. With a positive value of life, risk aversion amplifies the impact of uncertain survival on the discount rate, and thus reduces savings. Our...