This paper provides the closed form solution for the standard model of endogenous growth when consumers have present-biased preferences and make time-inconsistent savings plans, which they revise continuously. It is shown that long-run growth is not necessarily lower under present-biased...

Based on the HRS, I find strong dissaving of nursing home residents and a significant overestimation of U.S. saving rates from age 75 onwards if nursing home residents are excluded as in most micro datasets.

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.

In this paper, we consider a finite-horizon model with the time-additive utility and the time varying discount rate. With the assumption of the concavity of absolute risk tolerance, the concavity of the consumption function has been proved. This result significantly broadens the conclusion of...

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...

Hyperbolic discounting with naiveté is widely believed to provide a better explanation than exponential discounting of why people borrow so much and why they wait so long to save for retirement. We reach a different set of conclusions. We show that if financial planning is enriched to include...

In this paper we propose a new strategy for comparing the behavior of a hyperbolic discounter who possesses self-control problems to an exponential discounter who does not. Our strategy controls for inherent differences in overall levels of impatience across discount functions, which thereby...

In this note we show the following result of Dybvig (1995) is valid for a general von Neumann–Morgenstern utility function: for an agent who does not tolerate a decline in consumption, the optimal investment out of discretionary wealth (in excess of the perpetuity value of current consumption)...

We quantify the welfare gains from better retirement planning using a model in which retirement planning is time inconsistent. A modest increase in a household’s planning horizon by just a few years generates large aggregate and individual welfare gains.

We test the predictions of the sticky information model using a survey dataset by comparing shoppers’ accuracy in recalling the prices of regulated and comparable unregulated products. Because regulated product prices are capped, they are sold more than comparable unregulated products, while...