A Political Economy Theory of Government Debt and Social Security

This paper analyzes the determinants of government debt and social security for the old in a closed-economy, overlapping-generation model. Under the probabilistic voting, the model presents (i) an intergenerational link of resource allocation via debt and social security; (ii) multiple political equilibria; and (iii) a negative cor- relation between tax and debt. These three results are robust to the introduction of public goods as an alternative government expenditure or to the introduction of income heterogeneity within a generation.