It is known that when people generate externalities, a birth also generates an externality and efficiency requires a Pigou tax/subsidy on having children. The size of the externality from a birth is important for studying policy. We calculate the size of this "population externality" in a...

"Most state and local retirement plans strive for full funding, at least by actuarial standards. Funding measured at market values fluctuates and often falls short. A common argument for full funding is that pensions are a form of deferred compensation that does not justify a debt. The paper...

In most economies, investment is subsidized while capital is taxed. This is difficult to explain in a traditional perfect-foresight, representative-agent setting in which a single government sets all current and future taxes on capital. The authors consider a sequential-game setting in which tax...

We examine equilibrium voting strategies for elections with interested politicians facing uncertainty about voter pReferences. If politicians' utilities are defined over the set of strategies that voters select (instead of being dependent only on the probability of winning an election),...

Marginal effective tax rates on investment that are derived from the user cost of capital are nowadays widely used practically to assess the effects of capital taxation. In this paper, we examine several troublesome issues in the construction and use of marginal effective tax rates and user...

We develop a method for measuring the foresight agents have. We first dichotomize an agent's information at current date t into knowledge up to date t + f and expectations after t + f. We then form a residual-based test statistic that allows us to compare prediction errors for econometric models...

Resource allocation in a market where product quality is variable and where buyers can purchase partial information on product quality is investigated. It is shown that (1) (inefficient) equilibria with only low quality units can always exist; (2) (efficient) equilibria with only high quality...