Recent reforms that aim at reducing the upcoming burdens of population ageing might seriously harm low income individuals. An increase in old-age poverty and disability will be the result. Under this prospect, the present paper quantitatively characterizes the optimal progressivity of unfunded...

When Vietnam entered WTO in 2007 it was granted an accession period up to 2014. During this period tariffs would have to fall according to the accession agreement. This paper evaluates this 2007-2014 trade liberalization by building an applied general equilibrium model and calibrating it to the...

According to empirical studies, the life cycle of labor supply volatility exhibits a U-shaped pattern. This may lead to the conclusion that demographic change induces a drop in output volatility. We present an overlapping generations model that replicates the empirically observed pattern and...

This paper examines the consequences of international financial integration in a two–sector heterogeneous–agent dynamic general equilibrium model of occupational choice with financial constraints and idiosyncratic risks. We discuss the macroeconomic and distributional effects of financial...

We present a simple approach to transform a deterministic numerical model, where several agents simultaneously make decisions, into a stochastic model. This approach, which builds on scenario aggregation, a numerical method developed to solve decision problems under uncertainty, is used to build...

Ýmrohoroðlu, Ýmrohoroðlu and Joines [1995, A life-cycle analysis of Social Security, Economic Theory, vol. 6, 83-114] show that the optimal replacement ratio of the payas-you-go public pension system in the US economy amounts to 30%. We extend their analysis to a model that 1) replicates the...

This note demonstrates that optimal tax calculations in overlapping generations models should not be based exclusively on long-run welfare changes. As the latter represent a mix of efficiency and intergenerational redistribution effects, they typically favor policies which redistribute towards...

We study the short-, medium-, and long-run implications of stimulating annuity markets in a dynamic general-equilibrium overlapping-generations model. We find that beneficial partial-equilibrium effects of stimulating annuity markets are counteracted by negative general-equilibrium...

We show that the standard Value Function Iteration (VFI) algorithm has difficulties approximating models with jump discontinuities in policy functions. We find that VFI fails to accurately identify the location and size of jump discontinuities while other methods - such as the Endogenous Grid...

We study the importance of uncertainty and public finance to the welfare ranking of three environmental policy instruments: pollution taxes, pollution permits and Kyoto-like numerical rules for emissions. The setup is the basic stochastic neoclassical growth model augmented with the assumptions...