Human mortality data reveal that life expectancy in industrialized countries has been converging to a common value. Yet, significant variations in the distributions of adult life-table ages at death among some developed countries have also been observed. This paper, largely motivated by...

There is voluminous literature on the reasons behind career interruptions, ranging from maternity leave and organizational layoffs, to national service and human capital acquisition. We show that a standard, neoclassical model of intertemporal consumption/saving and labor/leisure choices without...

This paper studies a continuous-time life-cycle model with a consumption-leisure choice made by a finitely-lived agent with a random lifetime. We explicitly account for the leisure constraint in the corresponding constrained optimal control problem with a commonly postulated solution structure,...

Despite ample empirical evidence on the prevalence of high discount rates among people, applied, quantitative-theoretical macro studies with exponential discounting often assume low positive, or even negative discount rate values. Relying on recent advances from the numerical optimal control...

Contrary to the usual presumption that welfare in markets is maximized if consumers behave rationally, we show in a two-period overlapping generations model that there always exists an irrational consumption rule that can weakly improve upon the lifecycle/permanent-income rule in general...