Our societies are witnessing a steady increase in longevity. This demographic evolution is accompanied by some convergence across countries, whereas substantial longevity inequalities persist within nations. The goal of this paper is to survey some crucial implications of changing longevity on...

While little agreement exists regarding the taxation of bequests in general, there is a widely held view that accidental bequests should be subject to a confiscatory tax. We propose to reexamine the optimal taxation of accidental bequests in an economy where individuals care about what they...

The Preston Curve - the increasing relation between income per capita and life expectancy - cannot be observed in countries where old-age dependency is widespread (that is, where long-term care (LTC) spending per capita is high). The absence of the Preston Curve in countries with high old-age...

Welfare States do not insure citizens against the risk of premature death, i.e., the risk of having a short life. Using a dynamic OLG model with risky lifetime, this paper compares two insurance devices reducing well-being volatility due to the risk of early death: (i) an ante-mortem age-based...

This paper examines the potential role of higher education subsidies as an insurance device against the risk of having a short life, that is, as a device reducing the variance in lifetime well-being due to unequal longevities. We use a two-period dynamic OLG economy with human capital and risky...