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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We study Pareto optimal policy reforms aimed at overhauling retirement financing as an integral part of the tax and transfer system. Our framework for policy analysis is a heterogeneous‐agent overlapping‐generations model that performs well in matching the aggregate and distributional...