This paper studies the design of a pay-as-you-go social security system in a society where fertility is in part stochastic and in part determined through capital investment. If parents' investments in children are publicly observable, pension benefits must be linked positively to the the level...

This paper studies the design of pension schemes in a society where fertility is endogenous and parents differ in their ability to raise children. In a world with perfect information, a pay-as-you-go social security system is characterized by equal pensions for all but different contributions...

This paper provides a unified treatment of externalities associated with fertility and human capital accumulation within pas-as-you-go pension systems. It considers an overlapping generations model in which every generation consists of high earners and low earners with the proportion of types...

This paper studies the role of private and public long term care (LTC) insurance programs in a world in which family assistance is uncertain. Benefits are paid in case of disability but cannot be conditioned (directly), due to moral hazard problems, on family aid. Under a topping up scheme, when...

One of the pervasive problems with means-tested public long term care (LTC) programs is their inability to prevent individuals who could afford private long term services from taking advantage of public care. They often manage to elude the means-test net through “strategic impoverishment”....

This paper surveys recent theoretical economic research on long term care (LTC). LTC differs from health care: it is about nursing; it is mostly provided by unpaid caregivers (mainly spouses and children), whereas both the market and the State play a modest role. The future of LTC appears to be...

In many countries pension systems involve some form of earnings test; i.e., an invidual's benefits are reduced if he has labor income. This paper examines whether or not such earning tests emerge when pension system and income tax are optimally designed. We use a simple model with individuals...

This paper studies the role of family size in the design of optimal income taxation. We consider a second best setting where the government observes the number of children and the income of the parents but not their productivity. With a linear tax schedule the marginal tax rate is shown to...

Social insurance for the elderly is judged responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or in a first-best setting, there would be no such trend. However, when first-best instruments are not available, because health and productivity are not...

When educational policy is supplemented by a redistributive income tax, and when individualsdiffer in their ability to benefit from education, the optimal policy is typically rather regressive.Resources are concentrated on the most able individuals in order to get a "cake" as big aspossible to...