We pursue a cross-country comparison of relative financial readiness of older households in Japan and the Republic of Korea relative to the US. Our comparative analysis, using macro-level and harmonized longitudinal household financial data, covers the principal financial channels of old age...

Little attempt has been made so far to quantify the extent to which individual willingness to spend on life protection may account for the observed trends and diversities in agespecific life expectancies across individuals and over time. We address these issues via calibrated simulations of a...

The apparently unrelenting growth in the GDP-share of health spending (SHS) has been a perennial issue of policy concern. Does an equilibrium limit exist? The issue has been left open in recent dynamic models which take income growth and population aging as given. We view these variables as...

The problem of the uninsured cannot be fully understood without considering the role of non-market alternatives to 'market insurance' called 'self-insurance' and 'self-protection' (SISP), including the public 'health care safety-net' system. We tackle the problem by formulating a...

By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer new insights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreign risky assets, or "home bias", from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribes the "bias" to...

Risky-asset prices are conventionally modeled as "fully (information-) revealing". Much less work has been done on how prices get to reveal information. Following the "noisy-prices", rational-expectations approach, our answer focuses on the micro-foundations of information acquisition and the...