The Fragile Benefits of Endowment Destruction
November 2015. Journal of Political Economy 123(5) 1214-1226. With John Y. Campbell. (JSTOR / JPE Link.) A rejoinder to Ljungqvist and Uhlig "Comment on the Campbell-Cochrane Habit Model" (formerly titled "Optimal Endowment Destruction under Campbell-Cochrane Habit Formation"). The benefits of endowment destruction depend sensitively on how you discretize the model. Lesson: It's better to use the the continuous time version and make sure discretizations make sense. There is a nice lesson on how to extend diffusion models to jumps too. Computer program.