Heterogeneous Dynasties and the Political Economy of Public Debt.

We consider a small open overlapping generation economy with descending altruism. We introduce heterogeneity within dynasties by assuming that each parent procreates a fixed proportion of selfsh children at each generation. Altruistic parents can recognize the type of each children and tike into account when bequeathing. there is no Ricardian equivalence and an active public intergenerational transfer policy is attractive to altruism dynasty members, although there may be no unanimity among them. We display reasonable conditions for indirect preferences to be single-peaked and we apply the median voter theorem.