We characterize the optimal financing of productive public capital and compute the welfare loss from being unable to commit to the Ramsey policy. Because this calculation ultimately relies on numerical approximations, we contrast alternative approaches. While perturbation and linear quadratic...

This paper studies the political sustainability of the existing pay-as-you-go social security system in the face of recent demographic patterns. We analyze different approaches to privatizing the system and consider what it would require for them to be politically implementable. The analysis is...