Precautionary saving with changing income ambiguity

Abstract

We study a two-period saving model where the agent's future income might be ambiguous. Our agent has a version of the smooth ambiguity decision criterion (Klibanoff, Marinacci and Mukerji (2005)), where the agent's perception about ambiguity is described by a second-order belief over first-order risks. We model increasing ambiguity as a spreading-out of the second-order belief. We show that under a "Risk Comonotonicity" condition, our agent saves more when ambiguity in future income increases. We argue that the condition is indispensable for our result.