In this paper we document inequality trends in wages, hours worked, earnings, consumption, and wealth for Germany from the last twenty years. We generally find that inequality was relatively stable in West Germany until the German unification (which happened politically in 1990 and in our data...

In this paper we characterize quantitativelya the optimal mix of progressive income taxes and education subsidies in a model with endogeneous himan capital formation, borrowing constraints, income risk and incomplete financial markets. Progressive labor income taxes provide social insurance...

Projected demographic changes in industrialized countries will reduce the share of the working-age population. Analyses based on standard OLG models predict that these changes will increase the capital-labor ration. Hence, rates of return to capital decrease and wages increase with adverse...

This paper employs a large scale overlapping generations (OLG) model with endogenous education to evaluate the quantitative role of human capital adjustments for the economic consequences of demographic change. We find that endogenous human capital formation is an important adjustment mechanism...

This paper develops a theoretical model for the formation of subjective beliefs on individual survival expectations. Data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) indicate that, on average, young respondents underestimate their true survival probability whereas old respondents overestimate...

Psychological evidence suggests that people's learning behavior is often prone to a 'myside bias' or 'irrational belief persistence' in contrast to learning behavior exclusively based on objective data. In the context of Bayesian learning such a bias may result in diverging posterior beliefs and...

We model the optimal reaction of a public PAYG pension system to demographic shocks. We compare the ex-ante first best and second best solution of a Ramsey planner with full commitment to the outcome under simple third best rules that mimic the pension systems observed in the real world. The...

We develop a simple overlapping generations model to analytically show that population aging leads to increased educational efforts through a general equilibrium effect. The key mechanism at work in the model is that scarcity of raw labor increases the rate of return to human capital relative to...