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...

When the zero lower bound on nominal interest rate binds, monetary policy makers may lack traditional tools to stimulate aggregate demand. We investigate whether "unconventional" fiscal policy, in the form of pre-announced consumption tax changes, has the potential to meaningfully shift durables...

We study the sensitivity of optimal consumption streams with respect to perturbations of the random endowment. At the leading order, the consumption adjustment does not matter: any choice that matches the budget constraint simply shifts the original utility by the marginal value of the...

We develop a method that allows one to compute incomplete-market equilibria routinely for Markovian equilibria (when they exist). The main difficulty to be overcome arises from the set of state variables. There are, of course, exogenous state variables driving the economy but, in an incomplete...

Health insurance status can change over the life cycle for exogenous reasons (e.g. Medicare for the elders, PPACA for younger agents, termination of coverage at retirement in employer-provided plans). Durability of the health capital, endogenous mortality and morbidity, as well as backward...

Households tend to hold substantial amounts of non-financial assets in the form of inventory. Households can obtain significant financial returns from strategic shopping and optimally managing these inventories of consumer goods. In addition, they choose to maintain liquid savings – household...

Households tend to hold substantial amounts of non-financial assets in the form of inventory. Households can obtain significant financial returns from strategic shopping and optimally managing these inventories of consumer goods. In addition, they choose to maintain liquid savings - household...

We conduct a detailed analysis of investors in successful initial coin offerings (ICOs). The average ICO has 4,700 contributors. The median participant contributes small amounts and many investors sell their tokens before the underlying product is developed. Large presale investors obtain tokens...

We present the symmetric thermal optimal path (TOPS) method to determine the time-dependent lead-lag relationship between two stochastic time series. This novel version of the previously introduced TOP method alleviates some inconsistencies by imposing that the lead-lag relationship should be...