We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...

We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...

We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...

This paper studies and documents household participation in voluntary individual retirement accounts (IRAs) in eleven European countries. Using recently available, internationally comparable data of households aged 50+, we calculate country-by-country average marginal effects of the probability...

This paper analyzes optimal foreign aid policy in a neoclassical framework with a conflict of interest between the donor and the recipient government. Aid conditionality is modelled as a limited enforceable contract. We define conditional aid policy to be self-enforcing if, at any point in time,...

This paper analyzes the impact of limited enforceable international loans on international risk sharing and trade fluctuations in a two-country two-good endowment economy. Our specification of the punishment threat allows the exclusion from trade to last only finitely many periods and...

This paper studies how distributional and electoral concerns shape sovereign default incentives within a quantitative model of sovereign debt with heterogeneous agents and non-linear income taxation. The small open economy is characterized by a two-party system in which the left-wing party has a...

This paper studies the implications of household financial choices for the effects of monetary policy on consumption. Based on data from four major euro area countries, the paper estimates the key structural parameters using a simulated method of moments approach to match moments related to...