The rationality of choices is one of the most fundamental assumptions of traditional economic analysis. Yet, substantial evidence has documented that choices often cannot be rationalized by utility maximization. Several measures of rationality have been introduced in the literature to quantify...

Why do richer countries spend a higher share of their income on social protection than poor countries A newly assembled dataset on social protection spending for 142 countries since 1995 allows an exploration of alternate hypotheses, treating the pandemic period separately, as it entailed a...

This paper explores optimal consumption and portfolio decisions in the presence of risky house prices. We assume that changes in real interest rates and future rents directly impact house prices. A novel aspect of our model is that rent inflation rates and consumption inflation rates are...

Some economists argue antitrust policy should be based on empirical methods used by the Industrial Organization subdiscipline of economics, but non-economists must understand that those methods contain certain highly restrictive assumptions. Those assumptions involve econometric...

There is a growing momentum to base the poverty line on total consumption expenditure as it is a better measure of welfare. This chapter explores three related approaches to measuring household welfare that together represent an alternative ‘inductive’ measuring approach. We focus on...

We develop a new dynamic continuous-time model of optimal consumption and investment to include independent stochastic labor income. We reduce the problem of solving the Bellman equation to a problem of solving an integral equation. We then explicitly characterize the optimal consumption and...