Using an optimizing financial planning model in the tradition of Merton and Richard we explore how individuals should determine their life insurance and annuity choices, given uncertainty about investment returns and mortality. Both consumption and bequests appear as arguments in the...

A perennial criticism regarding the use of social media in social science research is the lack of demographic information associated with naturally occurring mediated data such as that produced by Twitter. However the fact that demographics information is not explicit does not mean that it is...

Notional defined contribution (NDC) accounts represent a new model for social security reform that so far has been adopted in seven countries. While NDC schemes remain public, they call for the individual accounts favored by neoliberal policy analysts. NDC schemes would address many of the...

Luxury bequests impart systematic effects of age to an investor's optimal allocation: the expected percentage allocation to equities rises throughout retirement. When bequests are luxuries the marginal utility of bequests declines more slowly than the marginal utility of consumption. This is...

This paper has two related purposes. The first is to bring together and review a number of earlier studies which have attempted to estimate the value of Australia’s privately held wealth stock. The second is to present new estimates covering the 1980s, based partly on these earlier studies,...

A central issue in the analysis of public goods is the relationship between the optimal provision level and the distribution of income. Theoretical research has stressed the conditions under which the optimum is independent of the distribution of income. Here we focus on numerical analysis of...