In his seminal model (Feldstein, 1985), the government operates a social security system to counter the representative worker's myopia. (i) For a complete myope, he determined a sizable optimal tax rate (and the corresponding benefit level). (ii) For a partially shortsighted worker, he...

We consider three transfer models with a representative individual who discounts the utility of the merit good with respect to the standard one's. In each model, a paternalistic government taxes the consumer and transfers him additional merit goods in return. The private purchase of the merit...

van Groezen, Leers and Meijdam (2003) (for short, GLM) analyzed combination of public pension and child support in an OLG model. We impose credit constraint on workers, and extend GLM's analysis from the case where workers do not understand the cost also to the case where they do. GLM's infinite...

What is the optimal retirement age? This paper looks at the optimal retirement age from various perspectives. Most of the current pension laws relating to retirement age were codified decades ago, and they have become badly out of date given what we now know about longevity, about health and...

This paper studies retirement and child support policies in a small, open, overlapping-generations economy with PAYG social security and endogenous retirement and fertility decisions. It demonstrates that neither fertility nor retirement choices necessarily coincide with socially optimal...

Pension reforms have been high on the political agenda in many developed countries over recent years and pension issues have been discussed intensely in the public as a result. In recent years, much effort has been devoted to make state, public and private pension systems fiscally more...

Many countries face the problem of how to reform social security systems to cope with increasing life expectancy. This raises questions concerning both distribution and risk sharing across generations. These issues are addressed within an OLG model with stochastic life expectancy across...

Increasing longevity causes an upward trend in the dependency ratio in many countries. This raises concerns about the financial sustainability of social security schemes, and reform initiatives and proposals abound. It is shown that a fundamental policy choice inevitably arises since a given...

Most private giving between living generations takes the form of "tied" transfers, such as help with housing downpayments. We argue that parents provide help with downpayments in order to encourage the production of grandchildren, and that such a subsidization emanates from the "demonstration...

We weave together care-giving, gender, and migration. We hypothesize that daughters who are mothers have a stronger incentive than sons who are fathers to demonstrate to their children the appropriate way of caring for one's parents. The reason underlying this hypothesis is that women on average...