We study a small open economy displaying Pareto-distributed wealth resulting from random death. The government runs a distribution scheme on inheritance. We present the mathematical background that allows to study the dynamics of means. We end up with ordinary differential equations for the mean...

The current level and form of subsidization of college education is often rationalized by appeal to capital constraints on individuals. Because borrowing against human capital is difficult, capital constraints can lead to nonoptimal outcomes unless government intervenes. We develop a simple...

We propose an overlapping-generation model wherein researchers belong to two groups, M or F , and established researchers evaluate new researchers. Group imbalance obtains even with group-neutral evaluations and identical productivity distributions. Evaluators’ self-image bias and mild...

The fact that consumers do not know in advance the dates at which they will die effects their individual consumption and portfolio decisions. In general, some consumers will end up leaving bequests at death, even if they have no bequest motive, simply because they happen to die at a time when...

A unified growth theory is developed that accounts for the roughly constant living standards displayed by world economies prior to 1800 as well as the growing living standards exhibited by modern industrial economies. Our theory also explains the industrial revolution, which is the transition...

International capital mobility has typically been ignored in discussions of the welfare effects of the capital income tax. In the a typical analysis which does consider the open economy it is recognized that highly-elastic capital flows could significantly alter the usual conclusions. While...

How does the provision of public pension benefits impact private savings? We answer this question in the context of a reform in Denmark that altered old-age benefit payouts through a discontinuous increase in pension eligibility ages contingent on birthdate. Using detailed administrative data...

We study the interplay between intragenerational and intergenerational equity in an economy with two countries producing and consuming from national capital stocks. We characterize the sustainable development path that a social planner would implement to achieve intertemporal egalitarianism. If...