This paper studies the life cycle consumption-investment-insurance problem of a family. The wage earner faces the risk of a health shock that significantly increases his probability of dying. The family can buy long-term ...

In a calibrated consumption-portfolio model with stock, housing, and labor income predictability, we evaluate the welfare effects of predictability on life-cycle consumption-portfolio choice. We compare skilled investors ...

Most defined contribution pension plans pay benefits as lump sums, yet the US Treasury has recently encouraged firms to protect retirees from outliving their assets by converting a portion of their plan balances into ...

This Chapter explores how an environment of persistent low returns influences saving, investing, and retirement behaviors, as compared to what in the past had been thought of as more “normal” financial conditions. Our ...

Self-control failure is among the major pathologies (Baumeister et al. (1994)) affecting individual investment decisions which has hardly been measurable in empirical research. We use cigarette addiction identified from ...

In the wake of the financial crisis and continued volatility in international capital markets, there is growing interest in mechanisms that can protect people against retirement account volatility. This paper explores the ...

This paper studies a household’s optimal demand for a reverse mortgage. These contracts allow homeowners to tap their home equity to finance consumption needs. In stylized frameworks, we show that the decision to enter a ...

We study risk taking in a panel of subjects in Wuhan, China - before, during the COVID-19 crisis, and after the country reopened. Subjects in our sample traveled for semester break in January, generating variation in ...

The DNB Household Survey (DHS) offers a unique collection of data that allows the study of both psychological and economic aspects of financial behavior; a panel study among 2000 households that has been active since 1993. ...

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is the longest running longitudinal household survey in the world. The study began in 1968 with a nationally representative sample of over 18,000 individuals living in 5,000 families ...