In this paper, we model an overlapping generation economy affected by an unexpected immigration shock and determine how households may insure themselves against “immigration risk”. We use the model to study the impact of immigration on (i) the welfare of different generations, (ii) the...

This paper considers the integration of economies as a merger of populations. The premise is that the merger of groups of people alters their social landscape and their comparators. The paper identifies the effect of the merger on aggregate distress. A merger is shown to increase aggregate...

The present paper quantitatively characterizes the consequences of rising pension progressivity in an overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic income, disability and longevity risk as well as endogenous labor supply at the intensive and extensive margin. Focusing on the German pension...

We use recently collected retrospective survey data to estimate the displacement effect of pension wealth on household savings. The third wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, SHARELIFE, collects information on the entire job history of the respondent, a feature missing...

This paper incorporates home production into a dynamic general equilibrium model of overlapping generations with endogenous retirement to study Social Security reforms. Specifically, home production takes housing, home input, and home hours as inputs and produces a good that is substitutable...

We investigate welfare and aggregate implications of a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security system in a dynastic framework in which individuals have self-control problems. The presence of self-control problems induces individuals to save less because of their urge for temptation towards current...

In this paper we examine the impact of tax contracts as a novel institution on elections, policies, and welfare. We consider a political game in which three parties compete to form the government and voters may behave strategically. Parties have policy preferences about the level of public-good...

We use factor augmented vector autoregressive models with time-varying coefficients and stochastic volatility to construct a financial conditions index that can accurately track expectations about growth in key US macroeconomic variables. Time-variation in the models׳ parameters allows for the...

We argue that the conventional approach to assessing the fiscal stance based on econometric tests of the government present value budget constraint (PVBC) is of limited practical use. We propose an alternative measure that focuses on short-run fluctuations in the fiscal stance, namely, a...