Determining how to value net government obligations is a long-standing and fundamental question in public finance. Its answer is critical to cost-benefit analysis, the assessment of fiscal sustainability, generational accounting, and other economic issues. This paper posits and simulates a...

In this chapter, I review empirical and theoretical literature on taxation of intergenerational transfers (estates, bequests, inheritances, inter vivos gifts) and wealth. The main message may be summarized as follows. Empirical evidence on bequest motivations and responses to estate taxation is...

We propose a model of cycles of distrust and conflict. Overlapping generations of agents from two groups sequentially play coordination games under incomplete information about whether the other side consists of "extremists" who will never take the good/trusting action. Good actions may be...

We propose a clientele-based model of the yield curve and optimal maturity structure of government debt. Clienteles are generations of agents at different lifecycle stages in an overlapping-generations economy. An optimal maturity structure exists in the absence of distortionary taxes and...

Projected demographic changes in industrialized and developing countries vary in extent and timing but will reduce the share of the population in working age everywhere. Conventional wisdom suggests that this will increase capital intensity with falling rates of return to capital and increasing...

I examine the impact of alternative monetary policy rules on a rational asset price bubble, through the lens of an overlapping generations model with nominal rigidities. A systematic increase in interest rates in response to a growing bubble is shown to enhance the fluctuations in the latter,...

We examine the equilibrium effects of college financial aid policies building an overlapping generations life cycle model with education, labor supply, and saving decisions. Cognitive and non-cognitive skills of children depend on parental education and skills, and affect education and labor...

We characterize the optimal linear tax on capital in an Overlapping Generations model with two period lived households facing uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. The Ramsey government internalizes the general equilibrium feedback of private precautionary saving. For logarithmic utility...

The evidence for the United States points to balanced growth despite falling investment-good prices and an elasticity of substitution between capital and labor less than one. This is inconsistent with the Uzawa Growth Theorem. We extend Uzawa's theorem to show that the introduction of human...

This paper formalizes and quantifies the secular stagnation hypothesis, defined as a persistently low or negative natural rate of interest leading to a chronically binding zero lower bound (ZLB). Output-inflation dynamics and policy prescriptions are fundamentally different from those in the...