Our societies are witnessing a steady increase in longevity. This demographic evolution is accompanied by some convergence across countries, whereas substantial longevity inequalities persist within nations. The goal of this article is to survey some crucial implications of changing longevity on...

This article surveys the theoretical literature on wealth transfer taxation. The focus is normative: we are looking at the design of an optimal tax structure from the standpoint of both equity and efficiency. The gist of this survey is that the optimal design crucially depends on the assumed...

This article models a two-period overlapping generations economy in the steady state where the realization of the quantity/quality number of children depends on an initial investment in children and on a random shock. It shows that the implementation of the first-best allocation, in which the...

Corporate success stories often resemble a snowball. We show how initial luck in hiring talented people, the resulting technological advantage, superior corporate culture, and status-seeking by workers and by consumers can make small initial differences generate large differences over time.

Consider a public project which produces a consumption good and which benefits ruture generations. Let a conventional cost-benefit analysis find that it gives higher benefits than projects it would dis-place in the private sector. Voters may nevertheless oppose the public project: the...