Does Social Security redistribute across cohorts? Or is it a program for purchasing the jobs' of the elderly? I formalize both models, showing how they have some predictions in common the most important of which is that generational accounts have the appearance of a pyramid scheme.' I also...

Some of the important implications of the parental investment model of intergenerational mobility have been derived under the assumption that parental income is the main source of heterogeneity. We explicitly model the variability and inheritability of innate' earnings ability and the...

In contrast to recent literature, we show that market access requirements (MARs) can be implemented in a procompetitive manner even in the absence of threats in related markets. By focusing on subsidies that are paid only when the requirement is met, we show that a MAR can increase aggregate...

Why are higher quality niches seen as intrinsically more profitable in business circles? Why do high quality products sometimes have a low real price, while it is unusual to see low quality products with high real prices? Can markets have quality differentiation as well as quality bunching? In...

166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old age Social Security as a public program? We document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and implicit taxes on labor supply,...

Why are the old politically successful? We build a simple interest group model in which political pressure is time-intensive, showing that in the political competitive equilibrium each group lobbies for government policies that lower their own value of time but that the old do so to a greater...

I show that the indivisible labor' models of Diamond and Mirrlees (1978, 1986), Hansen (1985), Rogerson (1988), Christiano and Eichenbaum (1992), and many others are, when aggregated across persons with the same marginal utility of income, equivalent to the divisible labor model of Lucas and...

In oligopolistic situations content protection can have unexpected effects as it changes the nature of interactions between input suppliers. With a duoply, it does so in a manner that makes the foreign firm wish to match price increases and decreases of the domestic firm. Domestic input...

This paper deals with the effect of trade restrictions on competition in oligopolistic markets. Quantitative restrictions, such as VER's (Voluntary Export Restrictions) are shown to affect the extent to which foreign firms can compete in the domestic market, and hence to raise the equilibrium...

Thereare three points made in this paper. The first is that the question concerning choice of a product line by a monopolist is similar in structure to other adverse selection problems -- and can be analyzed in an elementary way by adapting techniques recently developed for such problems. Such...