We investigate the role that climatic change has played in the pattern of urbanization in sub- Saharan African countries compared to the rest of the developing world. To this end we assemble a cross-country panel data set that allows us to estimate the determinants of urbanization. The results...

While there have been some references in the literature to the potential role of the general decline in rainfall in sub-Saharan African nations on their poor growth performance relative to other developing countries, this avenue remains empirically unexplored. In this paper we use a new...

This paper reviews a number of recent contributions that study pension design with myopic individuals. Its objective is to explore how the presence of more or less myopic individuals affects pension design when individuals differ also in productivity. This double heterogeneity gives rise to an...

We develop a model where individuals all have the same probability of becoming dependent and vote over the social long term care insurance contribution rate before buying additional private insurance and saving. We study three types of behavioral biases, all having in common that agents...

Long term care (LTC) is mainly provided by the family and subsidiarily by the market and the government. To understand the role of these three institutions it is important to understand the motives and the working of family solidarity. In this paper we focus on the case when LTC is provided by...

The paper addresses intergenerational and intragenerational equity in an overlapping generation economy. We aim at defining an egalitarian distribution of a constant stream of resources, when preferences are ordinal and non-comparable. We establish the impossibility of efficiently distributing...

This paper studies the optimal linear pension scheme when society consists of rational and myopic individuals. Myopic individuals have, ex ante, a strong preference for the present even though, ex post, they would regret not to have saved enough. While rational and myopic persons share the same...

Starting from the US Sky Trust claim that the "the sky belongs to us equally", this paper distinguishes two sources through which overlapping generations may consent to the use of the environment whom they are the owners: the common consent of all generations reached behind the Rawlsian veil of...

This paper shows that the combination of habit formation – present consumption creating additional consumption needs in the future – and myopia may explain why some retirees are forced to "unretire", i.e., unexpectedly return to work. It also shows that when myopia about habit formation...

Among the rationales for social security, there is the fact that some people have to be forced to save. To explain undersaving, rational prodigality and hyperbolic preferences are often cited but treated separably. In this paper we study those two particular behaviors that lead to forced saving...