I have a big problem with conventional personal financial planning. Unfortunately, it has little connection to what basic economics and, indeed, common sense recommends. As a consequence, it produces ...

We study the consumption response to typical labor income shocks and investigate how these vary by wealth and race. First, we estimate the elasticity of consumption with respect to income using an ...

Editor's note: Financial Planning 1.0 is what most of us encounter through advisers or on the Internet. Meet version 2.0. This is the first in an eight-part series, written by Laurence Kotlikoff and ...

Citations: Ponticelli, Jacopo, Amir Sufi, Atif Mian, Gabriel Garber. 2024. Consumption Smoothing or Consumption Binging? The effects of government-led consumer credit expansion in Brazil. Journal of ...

Whenever agents have access to a production technology they will engineer optimal consumption paths. This is usually perceived as making the task of explaining asset prices much harder. We show that ...