Economists and demographers have long argued that fertility differs by income (differential fertility), and that social security creates incentives for people to rear fewer children. Does the effect of social security on fertility differ by income? How does social security change the...

This paper studies the effects of health shocks on the demand for health insurance and annuities, precautionary saving, and the welfare implications of public policies in a simple life-cycle model. I show that when the health shock simultaneously increases health expenses and reduces longevity,...

Some path-breaking work on mergers takes efficiency gains for granted, or assumes that firms have perfect knowledge when taking merger decisions. In practice, firms and competition authorities cannot know exact future efficiency gains, prior to merger consummation. This paper analyzes horizontal...

This paper analyses the profitability of horizontal mergers in a Stackelberg model and their impact on welfare when there is uncertainty about the marginal costs of the newly merged firms. The authors consider that the merging firms decide their production strategy knowing the actual value of...

The paper investigates firms' behavior and outcomes (levels of cost-reducing R&D, output, profit and welfare in equilibrium) in a differentiated duopoly with process innovation. One of the important features in this paper is that spillovers operate in the R&D stage and are tied to the degree of...

We construct a unified objective measure of health status: the frailty index, defined as the cumulative sum of all adverse health indicators observed for an individual. First, we show that the frailty index has several advantages over self-reported health status, particularly when studying...

Using a dynamic panel approach, we provide empirical evidence that negative health shocks reduce earnings. The effect is primarily driven by the participation margin and is concentrated in less educated individuals and those with poor health. We build a dynamic, general equilibrium, life cycle...

In 2011, the publicly held debt-to-GDP ratio in the United States reached 68% and is expected to continue rising. Many proposals to curb the government deficit and the resulting debt are being discussed. In this paper, we use the standard neoclassical growth model to examine the future path of...

During the 2011-2015 period, Turkey's current account deficit as a percentage of GDP was one of the largest among the OECD countries. In this paper, we examine if this deficit can be considered sustainable using the Engel and Rogers (2006) approach. In this framework, the current account of a...