We study the impact of endogenous longevity on optimal tax progressivity and inequality in an overlapping generations model with skill heterogeneity. Higher tax progressivity decreases both the longevity gap and net income inequality, but at the expense of lower average lifetime and lower...

We study the impact of a fully-funded social security system in an economy with heterogeneous consumers. The unobservability of individual health conditions leads to adverse selection in the private annuity market. Introducing social security - which is immune to adverse selection - affects...

While little agreement exists regarding the taxation of bequests in general, there is a widely held view that accidental bequests should be subject to a confiscatory tax. We propose to reexamine the optimal taxation of accidental bequests in an economy where individuals care about what they...

We document the relationship of a set of individual choices - including parenthood, marital state, and income - with an individual's cause of death. Using the data set of the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS) which follows one percent of the population of England and...

Dean Baker and Adriane Fugh-Berman have published a critique of a study I performed in 2007, entitled "Why has longevity increased more in some states than in others?ʺ One of the conclusions I drew from that study was that medical innovation accounts for a substantial portion of recent...

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 paper is to survey some crucial implications of changing longevity on...

This paper provides an explanation as to why population ageing is associated with deflationary processes. For this reason we create an overlapping-generations model (OLG) with money created by credits (inside money) and intergenerational trade. In other words, we combine a neoclassical OLG model...

Analysis of population aging is typically framed in terms of chronological age. However, chronological age itself is not necessarily deeply informative about the aging process. This paper reviews literature and conducts empirical analyses aimed at investigating whether chronological age is a...

We develop and study a neoclassical growth model with a realistic demographic structure. Our model complements recent developments in the overlapping generations (OLG) literature by highlighting the natural link that exists between different classes of macrodynamic models. Within the model we...

This research explores the persistent effect of the Neolithic Revolution on the evolution of life expectancy in the course of human history. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the onset of the Neolithic Revolution and the associated rise in infectious diseases triggered...