We analyze the demand for medical care and precautionary saving in a framework with uncertainty surrounding the incidence of illness and the effectiveness of medical treatments and a representation of preferences that disentangles ordinal preferences, risk preferences, and intertemporal...

We analyze precautionary saving behavior in a framework with labor and non-labor income risks, an endogenous supply of labor, and a representation of preferences that disentangles attitudes towards risk, attitudes towards intertemporal smoothing, and ordinal preferences for consumption and...

Recent research has shown that the "spirit of capitalism"--a preference for wealth itself, in addition to consumption--has important implications for growth and asset pricing. This paper explores how the spirit of capitalism affects saving and consumption behavior. We demonstrate that the spirit...

In this note we extend the theory of precautionary saving to the case of multivariate risk. We introduce a notion of multivariate prudence, related to a precautionary premium, and we propose a matrix-measure to capture the strength of the precautionary saving motive. We discuss the usefulness of...

In this paper we extend the theory of precautionary saving to the case in which uncertainty is multidimensional and we develop a matrix-measure of multivariate prudence. Furthermore, we characterize comparative prudence, decreasing and increasing prudence, the effect of uncertainty on the...