【Key Words】income and sickness shock, risk coping measures, assets, Vietnamese farm household 【JEL codes】 D91, O16 【Abstract】 Income variability and additional medical consumption should be major shocks for farm households in developing countries. This paper investigates risk coping measures against these different types of shocks using Vietnamese Living Standard Measurement Study. Estimating r...

This paper studies the quantity-quality trade-o¤model of fertility, under the assumption of hyperbolic discounting. It shows that the lack of self-control may play a di¤erent role in a developed economy and in a developing one. In the …rst case characterized by a positive investment in quality, the lack of self control tends to reduce fertility. In the second case, it is possible that the lack ...

This paper analyzes an agent’s option exercise decision under uncertainty. The agent decides whether and when to do an irreversible activity. He is tempted by immediate gratification and suffers from self-control problems. This paper adopts the Gul and Pensendorfer selfcontrol utility model. Unlike the time inconsistent hyperbolic discounting model, it provides an explanation of procrastination...

Procrastination, Academic Success and the Effectiveness of a Remedial Program Procrastination produces harmful effects for human capital investments and studying activities. Using data from a large sample of Italian undergraduates, we measure procrastination with the actual behaviour of students, considering the delay in finalizing their university enrolment procedure. We firstly show that proc...

The purpose of this paper is to survey the theoretical literature on wealth transfer taxation. The focus is normative: we are looking at the design of an optimal tax structure from the standpoint of both equity and efficiency. The gist of this survey is that the optimal design closely depends on the assumed bequest motives. Alternative bequest motives are thus analyzed either in isolation or co...

Data on the life-cycle profiles of inequality in wages, earnings, hours worked and consumption contains precious information for answering questions about the ability of households to insure labor market risk and about the sources of this risk. This paper demonstrates that the choice of whether to control for cohort effects or for time effects has a drastic impact on the estimated age profiles ...

Many classes of microstructure models, as well as intuition, suggest that it should be easier to trade when markets are more active. In the data, however, volume and liquidity seem unrelated over time. This paper offers an explanation for this fact based on a simple frictionless model in which liquidity reflects the average risk-bearing capacity of the economy and volume reflects the changing c...

Conventional rules of thumb represent simple, but potentially inefficient, alternatives to dynamic programming solutions. This paper seeks an intermediate ground by developing a framework for selecting optimal rules of thumb. Defining rules of thumb as simple functions of state variables, I solve for the optimal parameters of specific rules of thumb for portfolio choice and consumption. In the ...

Monetary transactions in which consumption is temporally separated from purchase naturally lend themselves to multiple frames and to alternative accounting schemes, which nonetheless maintain a modicum of discipline and authenticity. We investigate some of the relevant accounting rules, and find that advanced purchases (e.g., a case of wine) are typically treated as ‘‘investments’’ rather than ...

This paper develops an overlapping generations model to analyze the consequences of demographic structure changes induced by an exogenous shift in the birth rate. We …rst show that a …nite growth rate of the population that maximizes long-run capital per capita exists. Then, we examine the theoretical properties of this growth rate by showing that: (i) it corresponds to the demographic structur...