<DIV>In 1965, landmark legislation established the national Medicare system as a means of insuring access to medical care for all elderly citizens. Today, rocketing medical costs combined with a rapidly aging population have thrown the Medicare system off balance, moving it perilously close to...</div>

Using an overlapping generations model with endogenous but uncertain longevity, this article analyzes the effects of public old-age pensions on longevity choice and capital accumulation. When agents are not altruistic, increases in old-age pensions are longevity-neutral for golden rule economies...

The excess burden of taxation typically has two graphical representations in undergraduate microeconomics and public finance textbooks: the IC/BC (indifference curve/budget constraint) representation and the demand/supply representation. The IC/BC representation has the advantage of showing the...

This article evaluates the Social Security outcomes for different racial and education groups. Outcomes differ across groups due to the interactions between group-specific mortality risks and lifetime earnings, the benefit formula, and the benefit package, which includes life insurance, spousal...

This study revisits the long-standing issue of the relationship between government borrowing and long-term interest rates through innovations accounting in vector autoregression models. In particular, we consider the dynamic effects of primary deficits and both explicit and implicit debt on...

We use a simple lifetime utility maximization model to study the problem of medical resource allocation. This model leads to a welfare specification with a QALY (quality-adjusted life-year) component that captures an individual's preferences over both life expectancy and health status. The goal...

Utilizing a panel data set of 50 US states, this note investigates nonstationarity and cointegration of health care expenditures and gross state products (GSP). Both the individual state-based method and the recent panel data method are applied. Allowing for structural breaks in the test, we...