Decisions with long-term consequences require comparing utility derived from present consumption to future welfare. But can we infer socially relevant intertemporal preferences from saving behavior? I allow for a decomposition of the present generation's preference for the next generation into...

This paper estimates the importance of temptation (Gul and Pesendorfer, 2001) for consumption smoothing and asset accumulation in a structural life-cycle model. We use two complementary estimation strategies: first, we estimate the Euler equation of this model; and second we match liquid and...

We provide evidence that households discretize their inflation expectations so that what matters for durable consumption decisions is the broad inflation regime they expect. Using survey data, we document that a large share of the adjustment in the average inflation expectation comes from the...

This study proposes a novel nonparametric estimation approach to solving asset-pricing models. Our method is robust to misspecification errors and it inherits a closed-form solution that facilitates ease of implementation. By transforming the Euler equation, our estimate is fully identified, and...