An early death is, undoubtedly, a serious disadvantage. However, the compensation of short-lived individuals has remained so far largely unexplored, probably because it appears infeasible. Indeed, short-lived agents can hardly be identified ex ante, and cannot be compensated ex post. We argue...

This paper studies the normative problem of redistribution between agents who can influence their survival probability through private health spending, but who differ in their attitude towards the risks involved in the lotteries of life to be chosen. For that purpose, a two-period model is...

In the context of unequal deterministic longevities, classical utilitarianism exhibits, under time-additive individual preferences, a counterintuitive tendency to redistribute resources from short-lived agents towards long-lived agents, against any intuition for compensation. We examine the...

This paper aims to explore the sensitivity of longevity-adjusted measures of income, which have become increasingly popular as indicators of basic standards of living. For that purpose, longevity-adjusted income measures are computed for post-war Japan under various sets of postulates,...

Although the optimal public policy under an endogenous number of children has been widely studied, the optimal public intervention under an endogenous timing of births has remained largely unexplored. This paper examines the optimal family policy when the timing of births is chosen by...