We use a controlled laboratory experiment with and without overlapping generations to study the emergence of public debt. Public debt is chosen by popular vote, pays for public goods, and is repaid with general taxes. With a single generation, public debt is accumulated prudently, never leading...

Democracies around the world are making promises to the old at the expense of future generations. I interpret this as reflecting low altruism - a discount rate on children's utility greater than the world interest rate - and I examine the implications in a small open economy with overlapping...

We study the impact of a government spending shock on the distribution of income and wealth between cohorts in a dynamic stochastic Overlapping Generations model with two types of households, Ricardian households and rule-of-thumb consumers. We demonstrate that an unexpected increase in...

We explore the benefits of intergenerational risk-sharing through both private funded pensions and via the public debt. We use a multi-period overlapping generations model with a PAYG pension pillar, a funded pension pillar and a government. Shocks are smoothed via the public debt and variations...

Is there a link between public debt and wealth inequality? Could government bondholders use intra-generational redistribution strategically to make the repayment of debt politically viable? Using a two-generations game-theoretic model, we identify coordination and divide-and-conquer as key...

Using an overlapping generations model, two new indicators of public pension system sustainability are proposed: the pension space, which measures the capacity to pay for pension expenditures out of labour taxation, and the pension space exhaustion probability reflecting demographic...