This paper surveys intergenerational altruism in neoclassical growth models. It first examines Barro's approach to intergenerational altruism, whereby successive generations are linked by recursive altruistic preferences. Individuals have an altruistic concern only for their children, who in...

This paper analyses the effects of disease and war on the accumulation of human and physical capital. We employ an overlapping-generations frame-work in which young adults, confronted with such hazards and motivated by old-age provision and altruism, make decisions about investments in schooling...

In this paper we study the implications of population ageing in an economy with a sizeable non-traded goods sector. To this effect a highly stylized micro-founded macro model is constructed in which the age structure of the population plays a non-trivial role. The model distinguishes separate...

One of the key decisions that economists working on integrated studies of climate change face is the selection of the method of accounting for damages resulting from possible climate change across a long temporal scale and the method for the intertemporal comparison of the costs associated with...

In an overlapping generations economy, lenders fund risky investment projects of firms by drawing up loan contracts in the presence of an informational asymmetry. An optimal contract entails the issue of only debt, only equity, or a mix of the two. The equilibrium choice of contract depends on...

Over the past four decades, real interest rates have risen then fallen across the industrialised world. Over the same period, nominal investment rates fell, while house prices and household debt ratios rose. I explain these four trends with a fifth — the widespread fall in the relative price...

In 1960s-1980s Japan enjoyed high economic growth. In the early 1990s, however, the growth rate drastically declined and thereafter Japan has been suffering secular stagnation. This paper proposes a dynamic macroeconomic model that can consistently explain such a drastic change in economic...

We quantify the impact of demographic change on real interest rates, house prices and household debt in an overlapping-generations model. Falling birth and death rates across advanced economies can explain much of the observed fall in real interest rates and the rise in house prices and...

This paper analyzes and compares the macroeconomic performance of defined-benefit and defined-contribution pay-as-you-go pension systems when population ages. When the fertility rate decreases or longevity rises, it is shown that a shift from defined benefit (defined total benefit or defined...

In this paper, we characterize the relationship between the initial distribution of human capital and physical inheritances among individuals and the long-run distribution of these two variables. In a model with indivisible investment in education, we analyze how the initial distribution of...