Our societies are witnessing a steady increase in longevity. This demographic evolution is accompanied by some convergence across countries, whereas substantial longevity inequalities persist within nations. The goal of this paper is to survey some crucial implications of changing longevity on...

We study the political determination of the level of social long-term care insurance when voters also choose private insurance and saving amounts. Agents differ in income, probability of becoming dependent and of receiving family help. Social insurance redistributes across income and risk...

Introduced by Samuelson (1975), the Serendipity Theorem states that the competitive economy will converge towards the optimum steady-state provided the optimum population growth rate is imposed. This paper aims at exploring whether the Serendipity Theorem still holds in an economy with risky...

The world’s aging population is expected to shape the future of economies across the globe. Without behavioral adaptation by current and future generations, this demographic transformation is likely to slow down economic growth. However, aging will also induce behavioral adjustments in savings...

When accidental bequests signal otherwise unobservable individual characteristics such as productivity and longevity, the tax administration should partition the population into two groups: One consisting of people who do not receive an inheritance and the other of those who do. The first tagged...

Social insurance for the elderly is judged responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or in a first-best setting, there would be no such trend. However, when first-best instruments are not available, because health and productivity are not...

This paper studies the incidence of tax-transfer policy in a growth model wherein individuals differ according to their level of intergenerational altruism and have an endogenous labor supply. The main result is that public debt is neutral at the macro level but redistributes resources from...

This paper analyzes an overlapping generation (OLG) growth model wherein saving finances second period consumption and bequest-as-consumption. First, it looks at the market equilibrium and at the optimal solution; then it turns to the issue of decentralizing the optimal solution with various...

The Atkinson-Stiglitz Theorem states that if labor is weakly separable from goods in household utility functions, differential commodity taxation should not be not part of an optimal redistributive tax system. This Theorem, which is arguable the most policy-relevant result to come out of the...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it extends previous models of non-cooperative private funding of pure public goods by allowing both for distortionary taxation of private goods and for subsidies based on contributions to the public goods. Second, it clarifies the type of behavioural...