The main purpose of this research is to understand the patterns of consumption of addictive goods, their economic and welfare consequences for society and the long-run effect of tax policy in a dynamic general equilibrium model of rational addiction. In contrast to prior research, we allow...

A popular view about social security, dating back to its early days of inception, is that it is a means for young, unemployed workers to 'purchase' jobs from older, employed workers. The question we ask is: Can social security, by encouraging retirement and hence creating job vacancies for the...

It has long been suggested that trade unions take actions and favor public policies that reduce the quantity of labor so that union members might enjoy greater labor incomes. Can this explain the prevalence of generous public pension programs inducing retirement? I suggest not, by formalizing...

Does Social Security redistribute across cohorts? Or is it a program for purchasing the jobs' of the elderly? I formalize both models, showing how they have some predictions in common the most important of which is that generational accounts have the appearance of a pyramid scheme.' I also...

I show that the indivisible labor' models of Diamond and Mirrlees (1978, 1986), Hansen (1985), Rogerson (1988), Christiano and Eichenbaum (1992), and many others are, when aggregated across persons with the same marginal utility of income, equivalent to the divisible labor model of Lucas and...

Marginal prices fell, and disposable incomes increased, for drug and alcohol consumers during the pandemic. Most of the amount, timing, and composition of the 240,000 deaths involving alcohol and drugs since early 2020 can be explained by income effects and category-specific price changes. For...

Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both economic models of the pandemic and public health policy recommendations often presume that the workplace is less safe, this paper seeks an answer both in micro data and economic theory. The...

The human capital investment model with endogenous labor supply is generalized to consumer and health behaviors while retaining the tractability of comparative-static analysis of a single first-order condition. Accounting for the endogenous specialization responses is essential to properly...