Democracies around the world are making promises to the old at the expense of future generations. I interpret this as reflecting low altruism - a discount rate on children's utility greater than the world interest rate - and I examine the implications in a small open economy with overlapping...

We study the impact of a government spending shock on the distribution of income and wealth between cohorts in a dynamic stochastic Overlapping Generations model with two types of households, Ricardian households and rule-of-thumb consumers. We demonstrate that an unexpected increase in...