This paper presents a simple framework that illustrates the link between skill-based wage differentiation and human capital acquisition given skill-biased technical progress. The analysis points to the economic costs resulting from labor market and income redistribution policies that prevent the...

This paper develops an overlapping agents model with age-specific mortality rates. The analytical framework also nests Blanchard''s (1985) ""perpetual youth"" model as a special, though perhaps not realistic, case. With age specific mortality rates, youth is ""fleeting."" Using standard...

This paper examines the variation in life cycle growth across the universe of Mexican firms. We establish two stylized facts to motivate our analysis: first, we show that firm size matters for development by illustrating a close correlation with state-level per capita incomes. Second, we show...

Evans (1991) has demonstrated that Blanchard’s (1985) finite-horizon model obeys approximate Ricardian equivalence. We show that this result is determined largely by an unrealistic assumption that labor income grows monotonically over a consumer’s entire lifetime. Introducing more realistic...

This paper examines the macroeconomic implications of life-cycle and dynastic saving behavior for closed and small, open economies. Using an extended version of Blanchard’s overlapping agents model, the analytical framework nests these two competing views, treating agents as either dynastic...

This paper develops a model to examine the macroeconomic implications of population aging. Using a general equilibrium framework, the analysis examines the various channels through which changes in demographics affect the economy. Age-earnings profiles are taken to summarize differences in...