Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we make two contributions to the literature on end-of-life transfers. First, we show that unequal bequests are much more common than generally recognized, with one-third of parents with wills planning to divide their estates unequally among...

In the presence of endogenous growth intergenerational transfer from the young to the old reduce per capita income growth and harm future generations. On the other hand, competitive equilibria are inefficient if externalities sustain long-run growth. This paper shows that if individuals retire...

A model is presented that explains the mix between funded and unfunded pension systems. It turns out that total pension and the relative shares of the two systems may be explained and are determined by the population growth rate, technological growth, the time-preference discount rate, that...

We construct a tractable discrete-time overlapping generations model of a closed economy and use it to study government redistribution of accidental bequests and private annuities in general equilibrium. Individuals face longevity risk as there is a positive probability of passing away before...

European integration forces system competition within European countries. This competition has important implications for both the public pay-as-you-go pension scheme and the public education system. Without labor mobility, each generation has an incentive to invest in the human capital of the...

This paper explored the determinants of survival in a life and death situation created by an external and unpredictable shock. We are interested to see whether pro-social behaviour matters in such extreme situations. We therefore focus on the sinking of the RMS Titanic as a quasi-natural...

In public good games, voluntary contributions tend to start off high and decline as the game is repeated. If high contributors are matched, however, contributions tend to stay high. We propose a formalization predicting that high contributors will self-select into groups committed to charitable...

Why do people have kids in developed societies? We propose an empirical test of two alternative theories — children as “consumption” vs. “investment” good. We use as a natural experiment the Italian pension reforms of the 90s that introduced a clear discontinuity in the treatment...