Dr. Dan Cao, Georgetown University
This event is part of the Economics Seminar Series series.
Location:
Gerri C. LeBow Hall408
3220 Market Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
This event is also being delivered online, participants must register to receive the link.
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Dr. Cao research intrest are Macroeconomics, Economic Theory, Finance, Computational Economics
Dynamics Savings Choices with Disagreements
We study a flexible dynamic savings game in continuous time, where decision makers rotate in and out of power. These agents value spending more highly while in power creating a time-inconsistency problem. We provide a sharp characterization of Markov equilibria. Our analysis proceeds by construction and isolates the importance of a local disagreement index, b(c), defined as the ratio of marginal utility for those in and out of power. If disagreement is constant the model specializes to hyperbolic discounting. We also provide novel results for this case, offering a complete and simple characterization of equilibria. For the general model we show that dissaving occurs when disagreements are sufficiently high, while saving occurs when disagreements are sufficiently low. When disagreements vary sufficiently with spending, richer dynamics are possible. We provide conditions for continuous equilibria and also show that the model can be inverted for primitives that support any smooth consumption function. Our framework applies to individuals under a behavioral interpretation or to governments under a political-economy interpretation.