I identify three areas of research that are important and have large potential payoffs. In all three areas I focus on needs and opportunities for theoretical analyses, since these are areas and research methods with which I am familiar, without any intention to underplay the importance as well...

Social Security trust fund portfolio diversification to include some equities reduces the equity premium by raising the safe real interest rate. This requires changes in taxes. Under the hypothesis of constant marginal returns to risky investments, trust fund diversification lowers the price of...

Among the elderly, Social Security income is distributed very differently than private pension and asset income. For the bottom quintile of the income distribution, 81 percent of income comes from Social Security, while only 6 percent is from pensions plus income from assets. For the top...

Over the past thirty years, macroeconomists thinking about aggregate labor market dynamics have organized their thought around two relations, the Phillips curve and the Beveridge curve. The Beveridge curve, the relation between unemployment and vacancies, has very much played second fiddle. We...

This is an edited transcript of a talk prepared for the Centre for Research on Pensions and Welfare Policies workshop: Opting Out of Social Security: Scope, Limits and Welfare Implications, Turin, 5 June 2000

Justifications for the use of punitive damages refer to deterrence and punishment. After formulating a social welfare function that incorporates both economic efficiency and a desire for retribution, optimal punitive damages are considered to balance concerns for economic efficiency and for...