This paper identifies a new sufficient condition for a prudent agent to have positive precautionary saving in the presence of labor income and interest rate risks of any size. We also provide three economic interpretations for this condition focusing respectively on the marginal effect of saving...

With moral hazard and anonymous asset trade, first-order conditions need not characterize effort and portfolio choices. The standard procedure for establishing validity of the first-order approach in economies with one hidden asset is not fruitful when multiple assets are hidden.

This letter develops a set of simple conditions under which an individual is willing to save an extra amount of money due to the presence of ambiguity concerning his second period wealth. This extra precautionary saving motive is naturally associated with the notion of ambiguity prudence.

This paper derives closed-form and numerical solutions for relative risk aversion in a standard consumption-based model enriched with housing. The presence of housing enables the household to hedge against unexpected shocks and may decrease relative risk aversion. In addition, housing may...

Recent work about risk preferences at the micro level mainly finds that changes in liquid wealth over time do not affect or have a positive effect on the liquid risky asset share. This paper embeds riskless noncapital income in standard portfolio choice models, and shows that exogenous...

Kimball (1990a,b) established that income risk increases the marginal propensity to consume if and only if absolute prudence decreases. We characterize decreasing and increasing multivariate prudence and show that a multidimensional risk increases the marginal propensity to consume if and only...

This study shows that China’s Consumer Expectation Index contains useful information about pure expectation shocks, which are unrelated to economic fundamentals. It turns out that such shocks are likely to be an important independent driver of industrial output growth.

This paper takes a deeper look at the measurement of the consumption–wealth ratio and analyzes its ability to capture variations in expected future stock returns. I find evidence of stock return predictability by taking a different approach than predictive regressions.

Standard macroeconomic models possess the undesirable feature that people stop working in the long run. Assuming standard parameters, the neoclassical model predicts that 2% of annual productivity growth leads to a 99% decline in the labor supply after 624 years. Yet, this contradicts the fact...

This paper characterizes a class of regularly varying production functions with an asymptotic elasticity of substitution equal to one. In particular, it is shown that these functions asymptotically approximate the Cobb–Douglas form. The results generalize and unify existing results in the...