Log-periodic precursors have been identified before most and perhaps all financial crashes of the Twentieth Century, but efforts to statistically validate the leading model of log-periodicity, the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model, have generally failed. The main feature of this model is that...

Even though smokers incur higher health expenditures than nonsmokers of the same age, smokers have significantly higher mortality rates, so the expected lifetime health expenditure for a smoker is actually lower than for a nonsmoker. Because of this fact, some politicians and policy-makers have...

A lifecycle consumption profile with a hump of roughly the same relative size and peak location as empirical consumption profiles can be obtained in a general equilibrium model where mortality risk is the only active mechanism that can account for the hump. Moreover, the key preference...

Skinner's [1988. Risky income, life cycle consumption, and precautionary savings. Journal of Monetary Economics 22, 237-255] second-order approximation to the consumption function under CRRA utility is generalized to accommodate any structure of uninsurable income risk. To second order, a future...

Precautionary saving in response to uninsurable income risk can in principle explain the stylized fact that aggregate saving increases with the variance of income, but it is controversial how much of the observed variation in incomes is, in fact, unpredictable. Borrowing constraints offer an...

A large number of papers have been written by physicists documenting an alleged signature of imminent financial crashes involving so-called log-periodic oscillations-oscillations which are periodic with respect to the logarithm of the time to the crash. In addition to the obvious practical...