This paper investigates the impact of borrowing constraints on welfare in a standard overlapping-generations model where parental altruism results in transfers. I find that the average level of welfare is higher when children cannot borrow against future income. As Bernheim (1989) showed, the...

We characterize Markov-perfect equilibria in a setting where the absence of government commitment affects the financing of productive public capital. We show that at any date, a government in office only considers intertemporal distortions over two consecutive periods in choosing taxes. We then...

The primary objective of this paper is to highlight the distinct roles of altruism and of self-interest in the political determination of a public education policy. I assess the relative importance of three factors in the determination of the equilibrium level of this policy: altruism, the...

This paper presents a new rationale for imposing restrictions on child labor. In a standard overlapping generations model where parental altruism results in transfers that children allocate to consumption and education, the Nash-Cournot equilibrium results in sub-optimal levels of parental...

In the standard neoclassical model with a representative agent, a benevolent planner who can commit to future policies will, if feasible, levy a single confiscatory tax on capital in the initial period and commit never to set positive taxes thereafter. We show that this policy, which allows for...

We analyze the problem of optimal public investment when government purchases of productive capital assets are financed through income taxes. Virtually all previous work in this literature has prescribed a share of public investment in GDP that is both constant and time consistent. This paper...

We characterize the optimal financing of productive public capital and compute the welfare loss from being unable to commit to the Ramsey policy. Because this calculation ultimately relies on numerical approximations, we contrast alternative approaches. While perturbation and linear quadratic...