Retirement Choices in Italy: What an Option Value Model Tells Us*

Retirement Choices in Italy: What an Option Value Model tells us

Using Italian data, we estimate an option value model to quantify the effect of financial incentives on retirement choices. As far as we know, this is the first empirical study to estimate the conditional multiple-years model put forward by Stock and Wise (1990). This implies that we account for dynamic self-selection bias. We also present an extended version of this model in which the marginal...

Through animal eyes: What behaviour tells us

To Charles Darwin, it was obvious that animals are sentient, so why should the idea not be now universally accepted? I review the difficulties and issues with animal sentience with a view to answering some of the critics. Sentience is ‘the hard problem’ and it is important we acknowledge the difficulties and do not claim too much for the evidence we have. Two sorts of evidence are examined: evi...

What Humour Tells Us About Discourse Theories

Many verbal jokes, like garden path sentences, pose difficulties to models of discourse since the initially primed interpretation needs to be discarded and a new one created based on subsequent statements. The effect of the joke depends on the fact that the second (correct) interpretation was not visible earlier. Existing models of discourse semantics in principle generate all interpretations o...

What Works Well Tells Us What Works Better

Quasi-option value and climate policy choices

In the climate change issue, the environmental irreversibility (risk of an acceleration of mitigation policies if the worse happen) has to be balanced with the investment irreversibility (risk of over-cautious policies). To explore this balance, we define an option value for a precautionary climate policy. Using the simplest decision-making model, we expose how option value relates to the expec...