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...

This paper introduces intergenerational equity into the analysis of transitions to a market economy. Analyzing Social Security privatization, we find that payroll tax labor market distortions, rather than capital tax capital market distortions, are the major source of any efficiency gain from a...