Egil Matsen

Habit Formation, Strategic Extremism and Debt Policy

We suggest a probabilistic voting model where voters’ preferences for alternative public goods display habit formation. Current policies determine habit levels and in turn the future preferences of the voters. This allows the incumbent to act strategically in order to influence the probability of reelection. Comparing to a benchmark case of a certain reelection, we demonstrate that the incumbent’s optimal policy features both a more polarized allocation between the alternative public goods and a debt bias.

Optimal information acquisition for a linear quadratic control problem

This paper develops a generalization of the linear quadratic control problem with partial information. As in the standard partial information setting, it is assumed that the state variable is only observed with noise. The idea in this paper is that the information level may be chosen optimally. In real life information is costly to acquire. It is therefore a trade off between the costs of getting detailed information and the increased value this information gives. We believe that the technique we present should have potential for application within both economics and engineering.

Habit Persistence and Welfare Gains from International Asset Trade

We introduce habit formation in a model that studies the link between international trade in financial assets, economic growth, and welfare. As with time separable preferences asset trade increases the mean growth rate, but it also increases growth-volatility. We demonstrate that the welfare gain from asset trade is lower with habit persistence in consumption. This reflects that the habit-forming households perceive the higher growth-volatility as a higher cost to obtain increased average growth. Calibrating the model to data for North America and Western Europe, we find that habit persistence lowers welfare gains of financial integration by about 40-50 %.

Human capital investment and optimal portfolio choice

We analyze how an individual should optimally invest in human capital when he also has financial wealth. We treat the individuals possibilities to take more education as expansion options and apply real option analysis. In addition, we characterize the individuals optimal consumption strategy and portfolio weights. The individual has a demand for hedging financial risk, labor income risk, and also wage level risk.

International diversification, growth, and welfare with non-traded income risk and incomplete markets

The study asks how the potential benefits from cross-border asset trade are affected by the presence of non-traded income risk in incomplete markets. It is shown that the mean consumption growth may be lower with full integration than in financial autarky. This can occur because: the hedging demand for risky high-return projects may fall as the investment opportunity set increases, and precautionary savings may fall as the unhedgeable non-traded income variance decreases upon financial integration. It is also shown that international asset trade increases welfare if it increases the risk-adjusted growth rate. This is always the case in the model, but the effect may be close to negligible. The welfare gain is smaller the higher the correlation between the domestic non-traded income process and foreign asset returns.