One of the pervasive problems with means-tested public long term care (LTC) programs is their inability to prevent individuals who could afford private long term services from taking advantage of public care. They often manage to elude the means-test net through “strategic impoverishment”....

This paper surveys recent theoretical economic research on long term care (LTC). LTC differs from health care: it is about nursing; it is mostly provided by unpaid caregivers (mainly spouses and children), whereas both the market and the State play a modest role. The future of LTC appears to be...

In many countries pension systems involve some form of earnings test; i.e., an invidual's benefits are reduced if he has labor income. This paper examines whether or not such earning tests emerge when pension system and income tax are optimally designed. We use a simple model with individuals...

This paper studies the role of family size in the design of optimal income taxation. We consider a second best setting where the government observes the number of children and the income of the parents but not their productivity. With a linear tax schedule the marginal tax rate is shown to...

Social insurance for the elderly is judged responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or in a first-best setting, there would be no such trend. However, when first-best instruments are not available, because health and productivity are not...

This paper studies the design of a pay-as-you-go social security system in a society where fertility is in part stochastic and in part determined through capital investment. If parents' investments in children are publicly observable, pension benefits must be linked positively to the the level...

This paper studies the optimal direct/indirect tax mix in a setting where individuals differ in several unobservable characteristics (productivity and endowments). Tax instruments (income and commodity taxes) are constrained solely by the information structure. It presents general expressions...

This paper studies the role of social insurance as a redistributive mechanism in presence of an optimal (linear or general) income tax. It considers a second-best setting with two unobservable individual characteristics: ability, measured by the wage rate and risk, measured by the probability of...

This paper studies the design of education policies in a setting of successive generations with heterogeneous individuals (high and low earning ability). Parents' investment in education is motivated by warm glow altruism and determines the probability that a child has high ability. Education...

We consider a two-period model. In the first period, individuals consume two goods: one is sinful and the other is not. The sin good brings pleasure but has a detrimental effect on second period health and individuals tend to underestimate this effect. In the second period, individuals can...