Uncertainty about the timing of retirement is a major financial risk with implications for decision making and welfare over the life cycle. We estimate that the standard deviation of the difference between retirement expectations and actual retirement dates ranges from 4.28 to 6.92 years. We...

We present a tractable model of the effects of nonfinancial risk on intertemporal choice. Our purpose is to provide a simple framework that can be adopted in fields like representative-agent macroeconomics, corporate finance, or political economy, where most modelers have chosen not to...

We extend the semi-parametric estimation method for dynamic discrete choice models using Hotz and Miller's (1993) conditional choice probability (CCP) approach to the setting where individuals may have hyperbolic discounting time preferences and may be naive about their time inconsistency. We...

We argue that narrow framing, whereby an agent who is offered a new gamble evaluates that gamble in isolation, separately from other risks she already faces, may be a more important feature of decision-making under risk than previously realized. To demonstrate this, we present evidence on...

This paper studies the pricing of volatility risk using the first-order conditions of a long-term equity investor who is content to hold the aggregate equity market rather than tilting towards value stocks and other equity portfolios that are attractive to short-term investors. We show that a...

Social interactions make communicable disease a core concern of public health policy. A prevalent problem is scarcity of empirical evidence that are informative about how interventions affect population behavior and illness. Randomized trials, which have been important to evaluation of...

Global climate change and other environmental challenges require the development of new energy technologies with lower emissions. In the near-term, R&D investments, either by government or the private sector, can bring down the costs of these lower emission technologies. However, the results of...

Investor sophistication has lagged behind the growing complexity of retail financial markets. To explore this, we develop a dynamic model to study the interaction between obfuscation and investor sophistication. Taking into account different learning mechanisms within the investor population, we...