We explore the extent to which social capital can play a role in imparting information about the returns to saving where potential knowledge gaps and mistrust exists. Using data from Vietnam we find strong evidence to support the hypothesis that information transmitted via reputable social...

The paper investigates the role of the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution () in determining the equity premium. This is done in an overlapping generations economy populated by agents that live for 2 periods and maximize a Kihlstrom-Mirman expected utility function. The equity premium...

Politicians, scientists and journalists have aired vastly different assessments of the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from rather optimistic to very pessimistic ones. In this paper we investigate how narratives conveying different assessments of the pandemic impact economic behavior. In a controlled...

This research inspects the general implications of considering duration of confinement as a deduction to the convicted consumer-worker time endowment. Even if analytically simple, the model is able to shed some light on the expected wage profile of criminals, and the pattern of their...

We estimate the long-run discount factor for a group of developed and developing countries through standard methodology incorporating adaptive expectations of inflation. We find that the discount factor of developing countries is relatively nearer to unity as compared to that of the developed...

We study the effect of changing income on optimal decisions in the multidimensional expected utility framework with strongly separable preferences. Using the Kihlstrom and Mirman (1974) (KM) utility representation, we show that the effect of changing income can be decomposed into a modified...

This research inspects the general implications of considering duration of confinement as a deduction to the convicted consumer-worker time endowment. Even if analytically simple, the model is able to shed some light on the expected wage profile of criminals, and the pattern of their...

Higher order risk preferences are important determinants of economic behaviour. We apply behavioural insights to this topic: we measure higher order risk preferences for pure gains and pure losses by controlling the reference point. We find a reflection effect not only for second order risk...

I compare two different ways of integrating mortality into life-cycle models: the standard additive model with time preferences, on the one hand, and a formulation that rules out the existence of time preference, but allows for risk aversion with respect to the length of life, on the other hand....

Building on Kihlstrom and Mirman (1974)’s formulation of risk aversion in the case of multidimensional utility functions, we study the effect of risk aversion on optimal behavior in a general consumer’s maximization problem under uncertainty. We completely characterize the relationship...