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Log-periodic precursors have been identified before most and perhaps all financial crashes of the Twentieth Century, but efforts to statistically validate the leading model of log-periodicity, the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model, have generally failed. The main feature of this model is that...

Uninsurable income risk is often cited as an explanation for empirical deviations from the Lifecycle/Permanent-Income Hypothesis such as the observation that the life-cycle profile of mean consumption is hump-shaped. Most methods used for estimating income uncertainty essentially measure the...

In addition, we show that income uncertainty exhibits a U-shaped profile over the lifecyle, with young and old households facing greater uncertainty than middle-aged households. This pattern is particularly pronounced for near and intermediate forecast horizons. Our results are robust to various...

Even though smokers incur higher health expenditures than nonsmokers of the same age, smokers have significantly higher mortality rates, so the expected lifetime health expenditure for a smoker is actually lower than for a nonsmoker. Because of this fact, some politicians and policy-makers have...

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

Recursive least squares learning is a central concept employed in selecting amongst competing outcomes of dynamic stochastic economic models. In employing least squares estimators, such learning relies on the assumption of a symmetric loss function defined over estimation errors. Within a...