The paper examines the scope for mutually beneficial intergenerational cooperation, and looks at various attempts to theoretically explain the emergence of norms and institutions that facilitate this cooperation. After establishing a normative framework, we examine the properties of the...

Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The paper outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one allowing...

Given that young children are under the control of their parents, if the government has an interest in either the welfare or the productivity of the former, it has no option but to act through the latter. Parents are, in the ordinary sense of the word, the government’s agents. They are agents...

A Beveridgean pension scheme invariably introduces a wedge between the wage rate and the marginal take-home pay. A Bismarckian one can do so only if it is not actuarially fair, or in the presence of credit rationing. Interestingly, if the two possible sources of distortion are present at the...

The paper re-examines the idea that a family can be viewed as a community governed by a self-enforcing constitution, and extends existing results in two directions. First, it identifies circumstances in which a constitution is renegotiation-proof. Second, it introduces parental altruism. The...

Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect, which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The article outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one...