In all societies intergenerational transfers are large and have an important influence on inequality and growth. The development of each generation of youth depends on the resources that it receives from productive members of society for health, education, and sustenance. The well-being of the...

Public transfer programs in industrial nations have massive long term fiscal imbalances, and apparently permit the elderly to benefit through pension and health care programs at the cost of the young and future generations. However, the intergenerational picture is turned upside down when public...

This paper consists of three reports on stochastic forecasting for Social Security, on infinite horizons, immigration, and structural time series models. 1) In our preferred stochastic immigration forecast, total net immigration drops from current levels down to about one million by 2020, then...

Understanding the economic lifecycle %u2013 how it varies and why %u2013 is important in its own right, but is also critical to understanding how changes in population age structure influence many features of the macroeconomy. Economic behavior over the life cycle can be summarized by the...

Even with well-developed capital markets, there is no private market mechanism for trading between current and future generations, so a potential role for public old-age pension systems is to spread economic and demographic shocks among different generations. This paper evaluates the smoothing...

We evaluate several actual and hypothetical sustainable PAYGO pension structures, including: (1) versions of the US Social Security system with annual adjustments of taxes or benefits to maintain fiscal balance; (2) Sweden's Notional Defined Contribution system and several variants developed to...

At each age an organism produces energy by foraging and allocates this energy among reproduction, survival, growth, and intergenerational transfers. We characterize the optimal set of allocation decisions that maximizes reproductive fitness. Time preference (the discount rate) is derived from...

Around the world, Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) public pension programs face serious long-term fiscal problems due primarily to actual and projected population aging, and most appear unsustainable as currently structured. Some have proposed the replacement of such plans with systems of fully funded...