Many economically important settings, from financial markets to consumer choice, involve dynamic decisions under risk. People are willing to accept risk as part of a sequence of choices---even when it is fair or has a negative expected value---while at the same time rejecting positive-expected...

We study time-consistent debt policies in a trade-off model of debt in which the firm can freely issue new debt and repurchase existing debt. A debt policy is time-consistent if in any state equityholders prefer to follow it rather than to deviate from it but lose credibility in sustaining debt...

Collateral constraints widely used in models of financial crises feature a pecuniary externality: Agents do not internalize how borrowing decisions taken in "good times" affect collateral prices during a crisis. We show that agents in a competitive equilibrium borrow more than a financial...

The discrete-time mean-variance portfolio selection formulation, a representative of general dynamic mean-risk portfolio selection problems, does not satisfy time consistency in efficiency (TCIE) in general, i.e., a truncated pre-committed efficient policy may become inefficient when considering...

Research has shown that procrastination has signicant adverse effects on individuals, including lower savings and poorer health. Procrastination is typically modeled as resulting from present bias. In this paper we study an alternative: excessively optimistic beliefs about future demands on an...

We study discretionary monetary policy in an economy where economic agents have quasi-hyperbolic discounting. We demonstrate that a benevolent central bank is able to keep inflation under control for a wide range of discount factors. If the central bank, however, does not adopt the household's...