Should governments implement policies that affect fertility decisions on efficiency grounds? What is the correct notion of efficiency to use? To address these issues, this paper develops an extension of the notion of Pareto efficiency, referred to as Millian efficiency, to evaluate symmetric...

Since the onset of the sovereign debt crisis, the crisis-stricken countries in Europe have been pushed to take drastic steps to consolidate their finances and reduce their budget deficits. Despite strong public opposition and largely damaging short-run effects, the countries have undertaken many...

We analyze risk sharing and endogenous fiscal spending in a two-region model with sequentially complete markets. Fiscal policy is determined by majority voting. When policy setting is decentralized, regions choose fiscal spending in an attempt to manipulate security prices. This leads to...

Generous early retirement provisions account for a large proportion of the drop in the labor force participation of elderly workers. The aim of this paper is to provide a positive theory of early retirement. We suggest that the political support for generous early retirement provisions relies...