The problem of the uninsured - those eschewing the purchase of health insurance policies - cannot be fully understood without considering informal alternatives to market insurance called "self-insurance" and "self-protection", including the publicly and charitably-financed safety-net health care...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Existing forecasts of a continuously rising income share of health spending (SHS) take per capita income growth and population aging as given. We develop a human capital-based endogenous growth model treating these variables as endogenously determined. In this private-economy setting, SHS has...

Conventional finance models treat risky‐asset prices as “fully (information) revealing.” Less work exists on how prices become information revealing. Our answer focuses on the micro foundations of information acquisition and the role of human capital in “asset management.” We derive...

To what extent can life protection account for observed diversities in age-specific life expectancies across individuals and over time? We provide answers via calibrated simulations of a life-cycle model where life’s end is stochastic, and age-specific mortality hazards are endogenous outcomes...

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...

Considerable attention has been devoted in the financial literature to excessive portfolio concentrations in domestic risky assets relative to those predicted by standard finance models-generally identified as"home bias"-across international markets. The innovation we offer is ascribing home...