Showing 1 - 10 of 147
Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014178432
We investigate partial insurance and group risk sharing in extended family networks. Our approach is based on decomposing income shocks into group aggregate and idiosyncratic components, allowing us to measure the extent to which each component is insured. We apply our framework to extended...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012915595
We investigate partial insurance and group risk sharing in extended family networks. Our approach is based on decomposing income shocks into group aggregate and idiosyncratic components, allowing us to measure the extent to which each is insured, having accounted for public insurance programs....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013025562
Using a lifecycle model of consumption, saving and portfolio choice combined with linked survey and administrative data on wealth and lifetime earnings we evaluate measures of retirement preparedness. We estimate heterogeneous discount factors for households and compare the estimates of their...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012834780
We introduce and characterize a recursive model of dynamic choice that accommodates naiveté about present bias. The model incorporates costly self-control in the sense of Gul and Pesendorfer (2001) to overcome the technical hurdles of the Strotz representation. The important novel condition is...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012950018
Humans cooperate a great deal in economic activity, but our two major models of equilibrium – Walrasian competitive in markets and Nash in games – portray us as only non-cooperative. In earlier work, I have proposed a model of cooperative decision making (Kantian optimization); here, I embed...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012950090
One measure of the health of the Social Security system is the difference between the market value of the trust fund and the present value of benefits accrued to date. How should present values be computed for this calculation in light of future uncertainties? We think it is important to use...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013134580
Conventional economics supposes that agents value the present vs. the future using an exponential discounting function. In contrast, experiments with animals and humans suggest that agents are better described as hyperbolic discounters, whose discount function decays much more slowly at large...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013157111
The 1996 PRWORA reform introduced time limits on the receipt of welfare in the United States. We use variation by state and across demographic groups to provide reduced form evidence showing that such limits led to a fall in welfare claims (partly due to "banking" benefits for future use), a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012927137
We introduce and characterize a recursive model of dynamic choice that accommodates naivete about present bias. While recursive representations are important for tractable analysis of in nite-horizon problems, the commonly-used Strotz model of time inconsistency presents well-known technical...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012928238