This paper shows that the combination of habit formation - present consumption creating additional consumption needs in the future - and myopia may explain why some retirees are forced to 'unretire', i.e., unexpectedly return to work. It also shows that when myopia about habit formation leads to...

This paper studies the design of a nonlinear social security scheme in a society where individuals differ in two respects: productivity and degree of myopia. Myopic individuals may not save quot;enoughquot; for their retirement because their quot;myopic selfquot; emerges when labor supply and...

This paper shows that the design of education policy involves a potential conflict between welfare and social mobility. We consider a setting in which social mobility is maximized under the least elitist public education system, whereas welfare maximization calls for the most elitist system. We...

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...

The Ramsey tax problem examines the design of linear commodity taxes to collect a given tax revenue. This approach has been seriously challenged by Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) who show that (under some conditions) an optimal income tax makes commodity taxes redundant. In the meantime, the...

This paper provides a unified treatment of externalities associated with fertility and human capital accumulation as they relate to pension systems. It considers as overlapping generations model in which every generation consists of high earners and low earners with the proportion of types being...

When accidental bequests signal otherwise unobservable individual characteristics such as productivity and longevity, the tax administration should partition the population into two groups: One consisting of people who do not receive an inheritance and the other of those who do. The first tagged...

We study the role and design of private and public insurance programs when informal care is uncertain. Children's degree of altruism is randomly distributed over some interval. Social insurance helps parents who receive a low level of care, but it comes at the cost of crowding out informal care....

When accidental bequests signal otherwise unobservable individual characteristics such as productivity and longevity, the tax administration should partition the population into two groups: One consisting of people who do not receive an inheritance and the other of those who do. The first tagged...

The Ramsey tax problem examines the design of linear commodity taxes to collect a given tax revenue. This approach has been seriously challenged by Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) who show that (under some conditions) an optimal income tax makes commodity taxes redundant. In the meantime, the...