What is the effect of the optimal information acquisition at date t+1 regarding the uncertainty at date t+2 on the saving behavior date t? This paper explores how agents choose the timing of uncertainty resolution and its effect on ex ante consumption-saving decisions. Under rational...

We investigate the effect of uncertainty on home durable purchase decisions, and empirically evaluate the efficacy of consumer durable policies under uncertainty. A model of lumpy home capital adjustment shows that elevated uncertainty leads households to adopt a cautionary perspective and...

For years, the insurance industry was essentially about mathematical quantification and financial transformation of physical risks. But our world has become more interconnected with the advent of the internet, blockchain etc.: as a consequence, cyber risk is expanding rapidly. Here, Prof. W....

We show how to use panel data on household consumption to directly estimate households’ risk preferences. Specifically, we measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages using a full risk-sharing model, which we then test allowing for this heterogeneity. There is...

Carroll and Kimball (1996) show that the consumption function for an agent with time-separable, isoelastic preferences is concave in the presence of income uncertainty. In this paper I show that concavity breaks down if we abandon time-separability. Namely, if an agent maximizing an isoelastic...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to...

We measure the extent of consumption insurance to income shocks accounting for high-order moments of the income distribution. We derive a nonlinear consumption function, in which the extent of insurance varies with the sign and magnitude of income shocks. Using PSID data, we estimate an...

In fifteen European countries, China, and the US, stocks and business equity as a share of total household assets are represented by an increasing and convex function of income/wealth. A parsimonious model fitted to the data shows why background labor-income risk can explain much of this...

This paper models the decumulation period of a Personal Pension with Risk sharing (PPR). We derive several relationships between the contract parameters. Individuals can adopt two approaches to the decumulation period of a PPR: the investment approach and the consumption approach. In the...