This paper examines the question of whether households adjust savings in response to interest rates in a life-cycle model with precautionary savings, where both motives for saving (retirement and precautionary) are present. While uncertainty may be the most important motive for younger households, eventually, households will start saving for retirement as well. By how much the wealth of the median household at retirement changes after an exogenous permanent increase in the after-tax interest rate is computed. In an estimated life-cycle model with precautionary savings, the elasticity of savings is also very low. However, the results are sensitive to the utility parameters.

This paper studies the estate tax in a quantitative framework with business investment, borrowing constraints, estate transmission, and wealth inequality. We find that the estate tax has little effect on the saving and investment decisions of small businesses, but does distort the decisions of larger firms, thereby reducing aggregate output and savings. Removing such distortions by eliminating the estate tax does not necessarily imply that everyone would be better off. If other taxes were raised to reestablish fiscal balance, those at the top of the wealth distribution would experience a large welfare gain, but most of the population would lose. (JEL D31, E21, H2)

This paper constructs and calibrates a parsimonious model of occupational choice that allows for entrepreneurial entry, exit, and investment decisions in the presence of borrowing constraints. The model fits very well a number of empirical observations, including the observed wealth distribution for entrepreneurs and workers. At the aggregate level, more restrictive borrowing constraints generate less wealth concentration and reduce average firm size, aggregate capital, and the fraction of entrepreneurs. Voluntary bequests allow some high-ability workers to establish or enlarge an entrepreneurial activity. With accidental bequests only, there would be fewer very large firms and less aggregate capital and wealth concentration.

We study how decision-makers' concerns about robustness affect prices and quantities in a stochastic growth model. In the model economy, growth rates in technology are altered by infrequent large shocks and continuous small shocks. An investor observes movements in the technology level but cannot perfectly distinguish their sources. Instead the investor solves a signal extraction problem. We depart from most of the macro-economics and finance literature by presuming that the investor treats the specification of technology evolution as an approximation. To promote a decision rule that is robust to model misspecification, an investor acts as if a malevolent player threatens to perturb the actual data-generating process relative to his approximating model. We study how a concern about robustness alters asset prices. We show that the dynamic evolution of the risk-return trade-off is dominated by movements in the growth-state probabilities and that the evolution of the dividend-price ratio is driven primarily by the capital-technology ratio.

. We develop models of robust decision-making and pricing when there are contemporaneous big and small shocks. We illustrate these models using a stochasticgrowth economy. Large shocks are infrequent changes in the technological growth rate, and small shocks are continuous movements in the technology process. Large shocks evolve as a Markov jump process whereas small shocks are a Brownian motion. Robust decision-making is formalized as a two-player game. In contrast to rational expectations agents, our investors are decision-makers who treat models as approximations and fear misspecication. As an algorithmic device to enforce robustness, investors imagine a second, malevolent player, who has the ability to perturb the baseline model. We study two economies, each of which decentralizes a robust resource allocation problem with hidden growth rates. The economies dier in the manner in which the the model is viewed as an approximation. We compare the pricing implications to those that em...