Abstract Social Security is the largest income redistribution program in the United States. Being primarily a retirement pension system, the redistribution has a particular timing. Taxes are collected through a regressive formula while workers are young and the benefits are paid through a...

We use an extended Barro-Becker model of endogenous fertility, in which parents are heterogeneous in their labor productivity, to study the efficient degree of consumption inequality in the long run. In our environment a utilitarian planner allows for consumption inequality even when labor...

taxes on family size.

How should society allocate health-care resources across individuals? In what ways is the current allocation of health-care inefficient? In this paper we study a model in which health status affects probability of survival and individuals are heterogeneous with respect to their labor...

This paper is motivated by two facts: 1) There is a significant difference in mortality across income groups. 2) This difference in mortality is getting larger. I study the extent in which progressively of social security is affected by differences in mortality across income groups and how...

Common wisdom suggests that a fully-funded actuarially fair social security system must increase welfare when households face longevity risk and annuity markets are missing. This wisdom is based on the observation that social security pays benefits as life annuities and therefore appears to...

In this paper we study the optimal cross sectional distribution of health care expenditures in a Mirrleesian style environment. We find that, under standard assumptions from the health literature, more productive types should have better health care and that all types should have some health...

We study policy reforms aimed at overhauling retirement financing. We develop a novel approach by considering optimal reforms: policy reforms that minimize the cost for the government while respecting the distribution of welfare in the economy. Our model is an OLG model with life-cycle features...

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...