Demographers emphasize decreased mortality and ‘economic development’ as the main contributors generating the demographic transition. Contrary to previous findings, we show that simple dynastic models à la Barro-Becker can reproduce observed changes in fertility in response to decreased mortality and increased productivity growth if the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is low enough. We...

We consider a two-sector economy with Cobb-Douglas technologies, laboraugmenting global external effects and increasing social returns. We prove the existence of a normalized balanced growth path and we give conditions for the occurrence of sunspot fluctuations that are compatible with both types of capital intensity configuration at the private level provided the elasticity of intertemporal su...

We use a standard single-agent model to conduct a simple consumption growth accounting exercise. Consumption growth is driven by news about current and expected future returns on the market portfolio. We impute the residual of consumption growth innovations that cannot be attributed to either news about financial asset returns or future labor income growth to news about expected future returns ...

Existing empirical evidence on the Euler equation based closed economy models suggests low responsiveness of aggregate consumption to changes in interest rates. We incorporate open features and consider extensions that include habit formation hand-to-mouth consumers. For several economies applying econometric methods are robust weak instruments structural changes, we continue find values for el...

This paper investigates the role of non-expected utility preferences in a multiperiod consumption/savings framework. Three objectives are achieved: First, it is shown that behaviour can be intertemporally consistent even if the preference ordering is not. Second, non-expected utility preference orderings are shown to be useful for disentangling the elasticity of intertemporal substitution from ...

Many stockholders irrationally believe that high recent market returns predict high future market returns. I argue that the presence of these extrapolative investors can help resolve the equity premium puzzle if the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) is greater than unity. Extrapolators’ overreaction to dividend news generates countercyclical expected returns. Rational investors res...