This paper investigates the effects of members' exits from a currency union on the credibility of the common currency. In our currency union model, the inflation rate of the common currency is determined by majority voting among N member countries that are heterogeneous with respect to their...

Households regularly fail to make optimal financial decisions. But what are the underlying reasons for this? Using two conceptually distinct measures of time inconsistency based on bank account transaction data and behavioral measurement experiments, we show that the excessive use of bank...

In many markets, consumers need to sign advance contracts with upfront fees and usage-based payments. Yet they may value consumptions inconsistently over time. They tend to overconsume temptation goods (e.g., credit cards), but underconsume aversion goods (e.g., gym visits), relative to initial...

We study the role of expectations of naive agents in a general equilibrium version of the Ramsey model with quasi-hyperbolic discounting. When agents recognize others’ naivete, as strongly suggested by empirical evidence, they revise consumption paths, correctly anticipating prices in a...

We consider a class of additively time-separable life-cycle consumption-savings models with iso-elastic per period power utility featuring resistance to inter-temporal substitution of θ with linear consumption policy functions. The utility maximization problem is dynamically inconsistent for...

The commitment ability of governments is neither infinite nor zero but intermediate. In this paper, we determine the commitment ability that a government needs to implement a unique equilibrium outcome and rule out undesired self-fulfilling expectations. We first show that, in a large class of...

Individual’s time preference may be influenced by a variety of factors such as economic conditions. In this paper, we consider the time inconsistent preference triggered by the switches of firm’s profitability state and apply it to the model of dynamic agency and the q theory of investment....