Rational expectations do not require beliefs to be consistent with history and with what agents can conclude from it. Actually, at a rational expectations equilibrium agents may hold beliefs that explain poorly the history they observe, even when restricted to only those rationalizing their...

We consider in this paper overlapping generations economies with pollution resulting from both consumption and production. The competitive equilibrium steady state is compared to the optimal steady state from the social planner's viewpoint. We show that the dynamical inefficiency of competitive...

For an overlapping generations economy with varying life-cycle productivity, non-stationary endowments, continuous time starting at _∞ (hence allowing for full anticipation), constant-returns-to-scale production and CES utility we fully characterise equilibria where output is higher than...

For a given technology, two ways are available to achieve low polluting emissions: reducing production per capita or reducing population size. This paper insists on the tension between the former and the latter. Controlling pollution either through Pigovian taxes or through tradable quotas...

The main result is that the golden rule equilibrium (GRE) is Pareto optimal (in the classical sense) in an overlapping generations (OG) model with constant-returns-to-scale production, transfers, arbitrary life-time productivity and CES instantaneous felicity. In addition, we extend Cass and...

We explore the optimal fertility age-pattern in a four-period OLG economy with physical capital accumulation. For that purpose, we firstly compare the dynamics of two closed economies, Early and Late Islands, which differ only in the timing of births. On Early Island, children are born from...

In an overlapping generations setup we address the issue of the optimal number of property rights to allocate over a natural resource when the goal is to maximize the stock of the natural resource at the steady state. We assume that the effect of the property rights regime on the evolution of...

Members of a rock and roll band are endowed with different creativity. They match and eventually obtain credit for song writing as well as a share of the returns from sales. More creative members increase the probability of success but may also claim a larger share of the pie. In our theoretical...

For two independent principles of intergenerational equity, the implied discount rate equals the growth rate of real per-capita income, say 2%, thus falling right into the range suggested by the U.S. Offce of Management and Budget. To prove this, we develop a simple tool to evaluate small policy...

This paper constructs an overlapping generations model of pollution externality wherein individ- uals are altruistically linked to their offspring as in Barro (1974). It is shown that steady-state consumption can be a decreasing function of the intergenerational degree of altruism. Despite...