I develop a quantitative, dynamic general equilibrium model of life cycle behavior to study the effects of several policy reforms on assets composition over the life cycle, wealth distribution and aggregate saving. Privatizing social security increases aggregate saving, decreases overall wealth inequality, and generates large welfare gain, especially for agents with high initial productivity. L...

Credit card default losses increased dramatically in the 80s and 90s, from 3% to over 5% of outstanding debt. We explore whether technological progress in debt collection is behind this change by developing a new theory featuring costly state verification with signals. We motivate our approach by the predominance of informal bankruptcy in the credit card market, which necessitates the costly in...

Significant nonlinearities are found in several cyclical components macroeconomic time series across countries. Standard equilibrium models of business cycles successfully explain most first and second moments of these time series. However, this paper shows that a model of this class cannot replicate nonlinear features of the data. Applying the Efficient Method of Moments methodology to build a...

We consider a representative-agent equilibrium model where the consumer has quasi-geometric discounting and cannot commit to future actions. We restrict attention to a parametric class for preferences and technology and solve for time-consistent competitive equilibria globally and explicitly. We then characterize the welfare properties of competitive equilibria and compare them to that of a pla...

The objective of the paper is to explain the last boom and bust in consumption in Ireland by the failure of consumers to correctly distinguish permanent changes in productivity from temporary changes. It uses a business cycle model, where agents update their beliefs about long-run productivity using information -that they receive continuouslyabout the future state of the economy. The analysis f...

Extending Barro (1999) and Luttmer & Mariotti (2003), we introduce a new model of time preferences: the instantaneous-gratification model. This model applies tractably to a much wider range of settings than existing models. It applies to complete and incomplete-market settings and it works with generic utility functions. It works in settings with linear policy rules and in settings in which equ...

This paper opens a new perspective from which one can explain the presence of government intervention in education even in the absence of human capital externality. It argues that consumption externalities can provide rationale for government intervention in education. Within the context of overlapping generations economy, it has also been shown that competitive equilibrium either underaccumula...

This article surveyed recipients of one-off government transfers in Singapore to investigate to what extent different behavioral motives might have affected their consumption response. It also investigates how the recipients’ personal characteristics might have affected their consumption response and the appeal of different motives. In the sample surveyed, savers were mostly motivated by precau...

Large institutional investors dominate many financial markets. This paper develops a consumption-based model of markets in which all institutional traders recognize their impact on prices. Bilateral (buyer and seller) market power changes efficiency and arbitrage properties of equilibrium. Predictions match temporary and permanent price effects of supply shocks, order breakup, limits to arbitra...

We use responses to survey questions in the 2010 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth that ask consumers how much of an unexpected transitory income change they would consume. The marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is 48 percent on average. We also find substantial heterogeneity in the distribution, as households with low cash-on-hand exhibit a much higher MPC than affluent household...