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...

Some of the important implications of the parental investment model of intergenerational mobility have been derived under the assumption that parental income is the main source of heterogeneity. We explicitly model the variability and inheritability of innate' earnings ability and the...

166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old age Social Security as a public program? Mulligan and Sala-i-Martin (1999) document several of the internationally and historically common features of social security programs, and explore...

166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old age Social Security as a public program? We document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and implicit taxes on labor supply,...

Why are the old politically successful? We build a simple interest group model in which political pressure is time-intensive, showing that in the political competitive equilibrium each group lobbies for government policies that lower their own value of time but that the old do so to a greater...

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...

We provide a model for analyzing effects of the tax system and spending programs on the determination of government spending and taxpayer welfare and show that tax system or spending program which is suboptimal from a Ramsey point of view can improve taxpayer welfare because the system creates...

Most studies of the intertemporal substitution of work use life cycle data and, from those studies, many have concluded that intertemporal labor substitution is unimportant for macroeconomics. This paper takes another look at life cycle data and argues that a consideration of measurement errors,...

It is argued that changes in workers' budget sets cannot explain the dramatic increases in" civilian work in the U.S. during World War II. Although money wages grew during the period wartime after-tax real wages were lower than either before or after the war. Evidence from the" 1940's also...

In this paper we propose a simple and general model for computing the Ramsey optimal inflation tax, which includes several models from the previous literature as special cases. We show that it cannot be claimed that the Friedman rule is always optimal (or always non-optimal) on theoretical...