Temptation and Commitment: A Model of Hand-to-Mouth Behavior

An earlier version of this paper was circulated as Kovacs and Moran (2018) “Temptation, Commitment, and Hand-to-Mouth Consumers”. We are grateful to Taha Choukhmane, Andreas Fagereng, Andrea Ferrero, Greg Kaplan, Mike Keane, Hamish Low, Costas Meghir, Ben Moll, Peter Neary, Cormac O’Dea, Carlo Pizinelli, Akos Valentinyi, Gianluca Violante, and seminar participants at Oxford, Yale, Manchester, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Statistics Norway, Bank of England, and Institute for Fiscal Studies for helpful comments. We would also like to thank two referees and the editor for useful comments. We would like to acknowledge the use of the University of Oxford Advanced Research Computing (ARC) facility in carrying out this work (http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22558). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• October 7, 2020