Abstract This paper applies the analytical tools of optimal taxation theory to the design of the optimal subsidy on preventive behaviours, in an economy where longevity varies across agents, and depends on preventive expenditures and on longevity genes. Public intervention can be here justified...

Longevity-adjusted growth rates are computed for Belgium over the period 1867-1997, by using a method based on contributions by Usher (1973a, 1980), Williamson (1984) and Miller (2000). Adjusted growth rates substantially differ from conventional figures, which may have tended to underestimate...

This essay is a survey of utilitarian criteria aimed at guiding what Parfit (1984) called Different Number Choices (i.e. choices affecting both people’s number and identities). The emphasis is laid on two aspects of those criteria: their ethical foundations and their implications. Our analysis...

Dans cet article, nous étudions l'impact des différences de longévité sur la conception des politiques publiques, en particulier celles liées au départ à la retraite. Nous montrons premièrement qu'alors même que l'espérance de vie a augmenté de manière très importante tout au long...

Individuals save for their old days, but not all of them enjoy the old age. This paper characterizes the optimal capital accumulation in a two-period OLG model where lifetime is risky and varies across individuals. We compare two long-run social optima: (1) the average utilitarian optimum, where...

Growth models with endogenous mortality assume generally that life expectancy is increasing with output per capita, and, thus, with individual consumption, whatever the consumption level is. However, empirical evidence on the effect of overconsumption and obesity on mortality tends to question...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the alternative explanatory factors of the so-called long term care insurance puzzle, namely the fact that so few people purchase a long term care insurance whereas this would seem to be a rational conduct given the high probability of dependence and the...

The public provision of long-term care (LTC) can replace family-provided LTC when adults are not sufficiently altruistic towards their elderly parents. But State intervention can also modify the transmission of values and reduce the long-run prevalence of family altruism in the population. That...

Income-differentiated mortality, by reducing the share of poor persons in the population, leads to what can be called the "Mortality Paradox": the worse the survival conditions of the poor are, the lower the measured poverty is. We show that the extent to which FGT measures (Foster Greer...

While demographers Lotka (1939) and Lopez (1961) proposed conditions on (exogenous) fertility and mortality laws under which populations with distinct initial age structures exhibit the same asymptotic age structure, this paper re-examines the issues of age structure stabilization and...