We study the optimal size of a pay-as-you-go social security program for an economy composed of both permanent-income and hand-to-mouth consumers. While previous work on this topic is framed within a two-period partial equilibrium setup, we study this issue in a life-cycle general equilibrium...

Contrary to the usual presumption that welfare is maximized if consumers behave rationally, we show in a two-period overlapping generations model that there always exists a rule of thumb that can weakly improve upon the lifecycle/permanent-income rule in general equilibrium with irrational...

Contrary to the usual presumption that welfare is maximized if consumers behave rationally, we show in a two-period overlapping generations model that there always exists a rule of thumb that can weakly improve upon the lifecycle/permanent-income rule in general equilibrium with irrational...

Contrary to the usual presumption that welfare in markets is maximized if consumers behave rationally, we show in a two-period overlapping generations model that there always exists an irrational consumption rule that can weakly improve upon the lifecycle/permanent-income rule in general...

Human mortality data reveal that life expectancy in industrialized countries has been converging to a common value. Yet, significant variations in the distributions of adult life-table ages at death among some developed countries have also been observed. This paper, largely motivated by...

The US social security tax rate has doubled in the last half century. Does the degree of myopic behavior that we observe in the US justify the size of the social security program? To study this question we build a computable general equilibrium model that is composed of life-cycle...

There is voluminous literature on the reasons behind career interruptions, ranging from maternity leave and organizational layoffs, to national service and human capital acquisition. We show that a standard, neoclassical model of intertemporal consumption/saving and labor/leisure choices without...

A static income tax evasion model à la Yitzhaki (1974) predicts that an increase in the tax rate causes taxpayers to increase their income declaration. In an important contribution, Lin and Yang (2001) obtained exactly the opposite result by extending the Yitzhaki (1974) model to a dynamic one...

A static income tax evasion model ?? la Yitzhaki (1974) predicts that an increase in the tax rate causes taxpayers to increase their income declaration. In an important contribution, Lin and Yang (2001) obtained exactly the opposite result by extending the Yitzhaki (1974) model to a dynamic one...

In this paper we develop a stochastic endogenous growth model augmented with income tax evasion. Our model avoids some existing discrepancies between empirical evidence and theoretical predictions of traditional tax evasion models. Further, we show that: i) productive government expenditures...