This paper develops an overlapping generations model of Social Security and human capital formation in which - somewhat against the conventional wisdom - an increase in the dependency ratio can lead to a reduced tax burden or less generous social transfers. A higher dependency ratio resulting...

Prediction is based on past cases. We assume that a predictor can rank eventualities according to their plausibility given any memory that consists of repetitions of past cases. In a companion paper, we show that under mild consistency requirements, these rankings can be represented by numerical...

This paper describes the database on U.S. patents that we have developed over the past decade, with the goal of making it widely accessible for research. We present main trends in U. S. patenting over the last 30 years, including a variety of original measures constructed with citation data,...

This paper studies the role of business cycles in the phenomenon of increasing government spending/GDP ratios in the OECD countries. Using a panel data set covering the 1975-1995 period, the main finding is that the prolonged rise in this ratio is linked to a cyclical bias; the spending/GDP...

The paper constructs a theoretical framework in which the value of information in general equilibrium can be linked to the efficiency of the risk sharing mechanism. We demonstrate that in economies with production, information may have negative value even though no risk sharing markets exist. As...