Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
957750 Journal of Economic Theory 2007 24 Pages PDF
Abstract

In life-cycle models of saving under uncertain lifetime and borrowing constraint, the consumer's wealth must be depleted before the maximum lifetime. This paper investigates the existence, uniqueness, and optimality of the terminal wealth depletion time. It is proved that the optimal terminal wealth depletion time, if such exists, must be unique. If the equation that determines the optimal terminal wealth depletion has multiple solutions, then the location of the optimal solution will depend on the configuration of the solutions. An optimality test is developed to verify whether a candidate solution for the terminal wealth depletion time is indeed optimal. The paper introduces a method new to economics, the Dubovitskii–Milyutin adjoint equation, to analyze the properties of the optimal control problem.

Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities Economics, Econometrics and Finance Economics and Econometrics
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