Health insurance status can change over the life cycle for exogenous reasons (e.g. Medicare for the elders, PPACA for younger agents, termination of coverage at retirement in employer-provided plans). Durability of the health capital, endogenous mortality and morbidity, as well as backward...

Despite clear evidence of correlations between financial and medical statuses and decisions, most models treat financial and health-related choices separately. This article bridges this gap by proposing a tractable dynamic framework for the joint determination of optimal consumption, portfolio...

Both educational expenditures and attainment have increased sharply over the last decades, despite rising prices of education, and stagnating income returns to human capital. This paper emphasizes conditional employment risks diversification as additional motivation for education demand. Job...

This paper presents and assesses a procedure to generate recursive measures of aggregate total wealth and portfolio return. The procedure is more flexible and yields more realistic measures, compared to the classical replacement cost and present value methods.

In this paper we gauge consumption and portfolio shares, rather than the traditional pricing implications. We study both aggregated (financial, tangible, and human) and disaggregated (deposits, stocks, insurance, and pensions) assets. The empirical shares are computed from recent aggregate...

This paper analyzes the important time variation in US aggregate household portfolios. To do so, we first use flexible descriptions of preferences and investment opportunities to derive household optimal decision rules that nest static, myopic, and non-myopic portfolio allocations. We then...