I present a model of consumption and savings for multi-person households in which members are imperfectly altruistic and share wealth. I show that, despite having standard exponential time preferences, the household is time-inconsistent: members save too little and overspend on private...

We motivate this paper with a puzzle. When we asked subjects to give five dollars to charity today, about 30 percent agree, but when the donation would instead be paid in one week, giving increases by 50 percent. The puzzle is that received models of self-control cannot explain this...

Restrictions on alcohol sales hours or days are commonly used tools in order to reduce alcohol consumption. However, a forward-looking consumer can buy in advance, and thereby mostly undo the impact of the restriction. I study whether time inconsistent consumer preferences can provide a...

This paper develops a model of optimal government debt maturity in which the government cannot issue state-contingent bonds and cannot commit to fiscal policy. If the government can perfectly commit, it fully insulates the economy against government spending shocks by purchasing short-term...

We propose a theory of optimal fiscal policy consistent with the observation that governments typically inherit their predecessors' plans and formulate their policies over a finite future horizon. We use this framework, which we call “Limited-Time Commitment" (LTC), to make two contributions....