It may be in the interest of low-ability individuals to subsidize the education of high-ability individuals. Sufficient conditions are surprisingly mild: positive externalities in education and complementarity in production between human capital and labor supplied by the low-ability individuals....

It has been argued that in the absence of altruism, intergenerational transfers can survive only if the old are net recipients. I prove that this need not hold in an over-lapping generations model with a fixed factor. For example, the middle-aged owning land may gain by providing public...

This paper proposes and analyzes a model of a "European economy" with three overlapping generations, redistributive social security, and public universities without tuition. Individuals differ ex ante. The effect of wage tax rate on occupational choice and the voting equilibrium of wage tax rate...

While the effect of social security systems on retirement decisions has received much attention, the impact of these systems on individuals' incentives to invest in their human capital has not been analyzed. We integrate human capital investment and retirement decisions in a simple analytical...

We consider taxation by a Leviathan government and by a utilitarian government in the presence of heterogenous locations within a country, when migration from one country to another is and is not possible. In a closed economy, a utilitarian government may transfer income from the poor to the...

The purpose of this paper is to survey 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 closely depends on...