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This paper constructs an overlapping generations model in order to demonstrate low political intervention and interaction in the working and retired generations affect the allocation rate in future growth-stimulating public investment and the public pension. It also analyzes the possibility of moving to a voting system that allocates parliamentary seats according to life expectancy. The presented results suggest the following three main findings. Firstly, the voting system is important when population demographics change. Declining birthrates and an aging population may shorten the temporal perspective for policymaking over time. Any theoretical transition from the current voting system to a voting system that allocates parliamentary seats according to life expectancy would thus lengthen the temporal perspective for policymaking, potentially increasing the public investment rate and improving the utilities of the working and future generations. Secondly, when age-based voting turnout disparity is high, the shift from the current voting system to one based on life expectancy and region or life expectancy and age is possible. Thirdly, if both transitions from the current system are possible, moving to the latter would offer greater possibility for increasing the utilities of the working generation and future generations than moving to the former.

This paper characterizes an intergenerational welfare state with endogenous education and pension choice under general equilibrium-probabilistic voting. We show that politically implementing public education program always increases the future human capital, but this higher future human capital would not help support a more generous social security in the future. The effect of implementing PAYG social security on education however crucially depends on the sources of funding for education investment. Establishing PAYG pension program depresses investment in public education. However if the source of funding for education investment is private, in both the cases when pension is the only instrument or when public pension and public education are implemented together as a package, there can be an improvement in education investment if and only if the political influence of the old is limited and so the size of the PAYG social security is small. A substantially thick pension scheme which results from a heavy influence of the old in the political process spoils the mutual benefits.

We randomly vary religious identity salience in laboratory subjects to test how identity salience contributes to six hypothesized links from prior literature between religious identity and economic behavior. We find that religious identity salience makes Protestants increase contributions to public goods. Catholics decrease contributions to public goods, expect others to contribute less to public goods, and become less risk averse. Jews more strongly reciprocate as an employee in a bilateral labor market gift-exchange game. We find no evidence of religious identity salience effects on disutility of work effort, discount rates, or generosity in a dictator game.

This paper examines the consequences of international financial integration in a two–sector heterogeneous–agent dynamic general equilibrium model of occupational choice with financial constraints and idiosyncratic risks. We discuss the macroeconomic and distributional effects of financial market integration for small economies which differ only with respect to the tightness of constraints on the domestic credit market. The results contribute to an explanation of the ‘Lucas paradox’, i.e. the empirical observation of capital flowing from poor to rich countries, where lending countries are characterized by tighter domestic constraints and lower capital returns. Capital market liberalization goes along with adjustments towards the world return. Capital–exporting countries experience an increase in GNP, whereas the GDP effect is of ambiguous sign and driven by the tightness of the domestic credit market. Countries with less tight constraints or unlimited access to external business financing loose throughout integration due to a decline in aggregate output and a very unequal distribution of welfare gains and losses in the underlying heterogeneous–agent economy. We find that international integration is only beneficial for economies where financial constraints on entrepreneurial activity are very tight. Here, we observe an accumulation–driven rise in the entrepreneurship rate, overall positive output effects and welfare gains for all members of society.

Dynamic externalities are at the core of many long-term environmental problems, from species preservation to climate change mitigation. We use laboratory experiments to compare welfare outcomes and underlying behavior in games with dynamic externalities under two distinct settings: traditionally studied games with infinitely-lived decision makers, and more realistic intergenerational games. We show that if decision makers change across generations, resolving dynamic externalities becomes more challenging for two distinct reasons. First, decision makers' actions may be short-sighted due to their limited incentives to care about the future generations' welfare. Second, even when the incentives are perfectly aligned across generations, increased strategic uncertainty of the intergenerational setting may lead to an increased inconsistency of own actions and beliefs about the others, making own actions more myopic. Access to history and advice from previous generations may improve dynamic efficiency, but may also facilitate coordination on non-cooperative action paths.

It is well-known that subjects can exhibit a preference for increasing payments. Smith (2009a) [Smith, J. (2009a). Imperfect Memory and the Preference for Increasing Payments. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 165(4), 684-700.] makes a related prediction that the difference between the preference for increasing wage payments and the preference for increasing non-wage payments will be largest for intermediate payments. We find evidence consistent with this prediction. Consistent with previous experiments, we find that the preference for increasing payments is increasing in the size of the payments. Also consistent with the literature, we find that the preference for increasing wage payments is stronger than the preference for non-wage payments. Our results contribute to the understanding of the optimal sequencing of wage payments over time.

We solve a general class of dynamic rational inattention problems in which an agent repeatedly acquires costly information about an evolving state and selects actions. The solution resembles the choice rule in a dynamic logit model, but it is biased toward an optimal default rule that is independent of the realized state. The model provides the same fit to choice data as dynamic logit, but, because of the bias, yields different counterfactual predictions. We apply the general solution to the study of (i) the status quo bias; (ii) inertia in actions leading to lagged adjustments to shocks; and (iii) the tradeoff between accuracy and delay in decision‐making.

The aftermath of the recent recession has seen calls to use transfers to poorer households as a means to enhance aggregate economic activity. The goal of this paper is to study the effects of wealth redistribution from rich to poor households on consumption and output in the short run. We first demonstrate analytically how the direction and size of the output effects of such interventions depend on labor supply decisions. We then show that in a standard incomplete-markets model extended to allow for nominal rigidities and parametrized to match the U.S. wealth distribution, wealth redistribution does lead to a temporary boom in consumption but a far smaller increase in output. Our results suggest substantial value in empirical research uncovering the distribution of marginal propensities to work in the population.

Recent studies indicate a paradox: rising income has not led to increases in long-term levels of life satisfaction. Therefore, the hypothesis that citizens adapt to the growth of GDP is tested. This paper analyses empirically the relationship between a deviation in the trend of seasonally adjusted GDP growth and life satisfaction in Euro zone member countries based on data from the European Commission’s Eurobarometer report. This approach is new to the literature and it enables us to detect medium-term adaptation effects on growth rates. This adds a new way of tackling the question of why economic prosperity has had little or no influence on life satisfaction levels.We found that country-wide differences in the relationship of trend GDP growth and life satisfaction exist. Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain showed a significantly positive relationship. For other euro member countries, the hypothesis does not hold. This suggests that two different groups exist and if everything else is held constant, economic growth strategies should vary.

Sustainability has been largely replaced by discounted utilitarianism in contemporary climate-change economics. Our approach rejuvenates sustainability by expanding the conception of the quality of life, along the lines of the UN Human Development Reports, to include not only consumption, but also education, leisure, the stock of knowledge and the quality of the biosphere. We report on our results showing that the quality of life can be sustained forever at levels higher than present levels, while reducing GHG emissions to converge to carbon concentrations of 450 ppm. Here we repeat our optimization but substituting consumption for the quality of life. Our sustainability results carry over. As it should be expected, optimal consumption is higher when the objective is consumption rather than the quality of life, but not by much (7% higher). On the other hand, the stock of knowledge is twice as large, and education is four times as large. So if the ?true? social welfare index were consumption, a planner who ?mistakenly? maximized the quality of life would be making a relatively small error. But the converse error would be large. If the quality of life provides an appropriate welfare index, but the public policy aims at maximizing consumption, the quality of life would be reduced by 60%. The expansion of the concept of welfare beyond consumption renders possible responding to the climate-change challenge by moving away from energy-intensive commodities and towards less intensive ones, like knowledge, education, and leisure.

Prior studies have found that subjects prefer an improving sequence of income over a constant sequence, even if the constant sequence offers a larger present-discounted value. However, little is known about how these preferences vary with the size of the wage payments. In each of four studies, we find a positive relationship between the preference for increasing payments and the size of the payments. We find no evidence that our measure of the decreasing marginal utility of money is associated with this relationship. Additionally, we find weak evidence in support of a theoretical prediction that the difference between the preference for increasing wage payments and the preference for increasing nonwage payments will be largest for intermediate amounts. We do not find a relationship between the preference for increasing payments and the preference for improving nonmonetary sequences. Finally, the relationship between the preference for increasing payments and the size of the payments does not appear to be sensitive to the precise specification of the increases.

International audience; In this paper, we study the behaviour of decision makers who show preferences for advancing the timing of future satisfaction. We give two definitions that are representative of this kind of attitude and investigate their implications in (an intertemporal version of) three popular models used in decision theory: the Expected Utility, the Choquet Expected Utility and the MaxMin Expected Utility models. The first definition reveals interesting links with the theory studying the impossibility of aggregating infinite streams of income, while keeping both strong monotonicity and equality among all generations. Our second definition turns out to be a behavioural characterization of what Irving Fisher called impatience. Finally, we make a connection with the notion of domination of one stream of income over another, for all interest rates.

This paper investigates ethical aggregation of infinite utility streams by representable social welfare relations. We prove that the Hammond Equity postulate and other variations of it like the Pigou–Dalton transfer principle are incompatible with positive responsiveness to welfare improvements by every generation. The case of Hammond Equity for the Future is investigated too.

Although both economists and psychologists seek to identify determinants of heterogeneity in behavior, they use different concepts to capture them. In this review, we first analyze the extent to which economic preferences and psychological concepts of personality, such as the Big Five and locus of control, are related. We analyze data from incentivized laboratory experiments and representative samples and find only low degrees of association between economic preferences and personality. We then regress life outcomes (such as labor market success, health status, and life satisfaction) simultaneously on preference and personality measures. The analysis reveals that the two concepts are rather complementary when it comes to explaining heterogeneity in important life outcomes and behavior.

To provide a normative foundation for transfers between dierent economies, one needs information on their “per capita welfare”. This paper considers various methods for doing this and reaches the following main conclusions: (i) Such global welfare comparisons are more demanding than usually thought. (ii) The ranking of methods diers from that of local (e.g., over-time) comparisons, with real comprehensive per capita NNP being the least impractical method. The lesson is that global welfare comparisons should be performed with great care. The comparisons must be made in local real prices calculated according to “purchasingpower-parity”, where non-traded environmental amenities play an important role.

This article analyzes the allocation of the government budget to civilian and military expenditure by two rival countries that are involved in an arms race. We compare the consequences of myopic (period by period) planning versus rational (long-term) planning and show that although myopic planning is always favorable for both countries, they are likely to become locked in a prisoners' dilemma equilibrium in which they plan rationally. The prisoners' dilemma equilibrium results in higher stocks of weapon systems and lower welfare for both countries. We also find some evidence of the existence of a prisoners' dilemma equilibrium in the current Israeli-Syrian arms race. Generally, this article suggests that solving military/political conflicts that evolve into an arms race by relying only on military might is an expensive and suboptimal solution. Each country should identify this phenomenon and attempt to take it into account in its decisionmaking by using appropriate policy alternatives. There are two major policy options in this case. The first option is to reach some kind of agreement with the rival (directly or through a third party). The second option is to institute force multipliers techniques.

Paul Samuelson's (1958) overlapping generations model has turned 50. Seldom has so simple a model been so influential. The paper, in spite of its ripe age, still elicits wonder. Starting from the uncontroversial observation that “we live in a world where new generations are always coming along” Samuelson built a model that violates the credo of the first fundamental welfare theorem with which we still inculcate undergraduates 50 years later. According to Samuelson, all is not necessarily well in the best of market economies: with overlapping generations, even absent the usual suspects such as distortions and market failures, a competitive equilibrium need not be Pareto efficient. Worst of all, this failure of the first welfare theorem in an overlapping generations model occurs in a framework that is, in many ways, more plausible and realistic than the world of agents living synchronous and finite existences in which the theorem is usually proved. Like Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile, the mysterious welfare properties of the overlapping generations model are, to a significant extent, responsible for its popularity—along with the many economic issues it has illuminated in the last half-century. I take it as my brief in this celebratory paper to provide, after a short exposition of the main results of the overlapping generations model under certainty, an explanation of why the welfare properties of the overlapping generations model differ so much from the canonical Arrow–Debreu framework and to review, in a deliberately nonencyclopedic mode, a few striking applications and extensions of Samuelson's deceptively straightforward model.

Job search is an unpleasant activity with immediate costs and delayed benefits. The tension between long-run goals and short-run impulses may lead unemployed workers to postpone repeatedly tasks necessary to find a job. In standard economic models, agents are assumed to be time-consistent, so that a contrast between short-run and long-run preferences never arises. However, a growing literature has challenged the conventional view, and allows agents to be time inconsistent by modeling their discount function as hyperbolic (as opposed to the standard assumption of exponential discounting). Agents with hyperbolic discount functions exhibit a high degree of discounting in the short run, but a relatively low degree of discounting in the long run. Therefore, hyperbolic agents are likely to delay tasks with immediate costs and delayed benefits, whereas they would choose to perform the same task if both costs and benefits were to occur in the future. This paper estimates the structural parameters of a job search model with hyperbolic discounting and endogenous search effort. It estimates quantitatively the degree of hyperbolic discounting, and assesses its implications for the impact of various policy interventions aimed at reducing unemployment. The model is estimated using data on unemployment spells and accepted wages from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). The likelihood function explicitly incorporates all the restrictions implied by the optimal dynamic programming solution to the model, and also accounts for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity. The parameters of the hyperbolic discount function are separately identified because different forms of discounting have contrasting effects on the different components of the job search process. The results point to a substantial degree of hyperbolic discounting, especially for low and medium wage workers. The structural estimates are also used to evaluate alternative policy interventions for the unemployed: a cut in unemployment benefits, a job search assistance program, monitoring search effort, monitoring the job acceptance strategy, and a re-employment bonus. I find that ignoring hyperbolic preferences may lead one to incorrect inferences on the effects of these interventions.

The recent literature on the endogenous formation of preferences has emphasized that while some preferences are more conducive to growth than others, economic growth also contributes to the formation of particular tastes [Becker, Gary S. (1996): Accounting for Tastes, Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press]. In this paper, we construct a neoclassical growth model where intergenerational altruism can be endogenously reinforced and entails costly sacrifices on the part of parents to acquire such trait. While the incentives to acquire altruistic traits depend on the economic conditions, in turn altruism determines the level of intergenerational bequests and ultimately the pace of capital accumulation and economic growth. It is shown that intergenerational transfers are driven by a natural degree of altruism at earlier stages of economic growth. Once individuals have satisfied their own physiological constraint in the course of economic development, they devote resources to shaping their altruistic preferences, increasing their social degree of altruism above its natural level. This in turn increases the share of intergenerational transfers and speeds up economic growth.

We analyze the impact of micro-founded political institutions on economic growth in an overlapping-generations economy, where individuals differ in preferences over a public good (as well as in age). Labour and capital taxes finance the public good and a public input. The benchmark institution is a parliament, where all decisions are taken. Party entry, parliamentary composition, coalition formation, and bargaining are endogenous. We compare this constitution to delegation of decision-making, where a spending minister (elected in parliament or appointed by the largest party). Delegation of decision-making tends to yield lower growth, mainly due to the occurrence of production inefficiency.

We study a rational expectations' competitive equilibrium in a production economy, i.e., a system of prices at which firms' profit maximizing production decisions and individuals' preferred affordable consumption choices equate supply and demand in every market. We derive the equilibrium price of the firm and the equilibrium short term interest rate, the optimal per capita consumption in society, as well as the risk premium on equity. First a simple linear production technology with constant coefficients is studied, then a more general technology, and finally a general production economy with recursive utility is analyzed by the use of the stochastic maximum principle. While the two first models can not explain the empirics well using conventional preferences, the latter model is found to be much more promising in this regard. We also demonstrate a simple proof for the ICAPM.

We analyze the relation between time preferences, study effort, and academic performance among first-year Business and Economics students. Time preferences are measured by stated preferences for an immediate payment over larger delayed payments. Data on study efforts are derived from an electronic learning environment, which records the amount of time students are logged in and the fraction of exercises completed. Our third measure of study effort is participation in an on-line summer course. We find that impatient students show weaker performance, but the consequences are relatively mild. Impatient students obtain lower grades and fail first sit exams more often, but they do not obtain significantly fewer study credits, nor are they more likely to drop out as a result of obtaining fewer study credits than required. We find a weak negative relationship between impatience and study effort. Differences in study effort therefore cannot explain impatient students’ lower academic performance.

We derive the equilibrium interest rate and risk premiums using recursive utility for jump-diffusions. Compared to to the continuous version, including jumps allows for a separate risk aversion related to jump size risk in addition to risk aversion related to the continuous part. The jump part also introduces moments of higher orders that may matter in many circumstances. We consider the version of recursive utility which gives the most unambiguous separation of risk preference from time substitution, and use the stochastic maximum principle to analyze the model. This method uses forward/backward stochastic differential equations. We demonstrate how the stochastic process for the market portfolio is determined in terms the corresponding processes for future utility and aggregate consumption. It is indicated that this model has the potential to give reasonable explanations of empirical puzzles.

We consider an economy where individuals face uninsurable risks to their human capital accumulation and analyze the optimal level of linear taxes on capital and labor income together with the optimal path of government debt. We show that in the presence of such risks, it is beneficial to tax both labor and capital and to issue public debt. We also assess the quantitative importance of these findings, and show that the benefits of government debt and capital taxes both increase with the magnitude of idiosyncratic risks and the degree of relative risk aversion. (JEL D52, H21, H24, H25, H63, J24) Human capital is an important component of wealth both at the individual and aggregate level, and its role has been investigated in various fields in economics. In public finance, Jones, Manuelli, and Rossi (1997) show that the zero-capital-tax result of Chamley (1986) and Judd (1985) 1 can be strengthened if human capital accumulation is explicitly taken into account. Specifically, they demonstrate that, in a deterministic economy with human capital accumulation, in the long run not only capital but also labor income taxes should be zero, hence the government must accumulate wealth—that is, public debt be negative—to finance its expenditure.

A rapidly rising carbon tax leads to faster extraction of fossil fuels and accelerates global warming. We analyze how general equilibrium effects operating through the international capital market affect this Green Paradox. In a two-region, two-period world with identical homothetic preferences and without investment, the global interest rate falls and the Green Paradox weakens. With investment or a relatively more impatient oil-importing region, the Green Paradox may be strengthened because the future oil demand function shifts downward or because the interest rate rises. If the oil-importing region is very much more patient than the oil-exporting region, the Green Paradox may be reversed but in our calibrated model the effects are tiny. With exploration and endogenous initial oil reserves, a future carbon tax lowers cumulative oil extraction in partial equilibrium. If the boost to current oil extraction is weakened, strengthened or reversed in general equilibrium, so is the fall in cumulative extraction. A partial and general equilibrium welfare analysis of a future carbon tax, both for full and partial exhaustion, is given. The effects of stock-dependent extraction costs are separately discussed in an Appendix.

Numerous experiments have demonstrated the possibility of attitude polarization. For instance, Lord, Ross & Lepper (1979) partitioned subjects into two groups, according to whether or not they believed the death penalty had a deterrent effect, and presented them with a set of studies on the issue. Believers and skeptics both become more convinced of their initial views; that is, the population polarized. Many scholars have concluded that attitude polarization shows that people process information in a biased manner. We argue that not only is attitude polarization consistent with an unbiased evaluation of evidence, it is to be expected in many circumstances where it arises. At the same time, some experiments do not find polarization, under the conditions in which our theory predicts the absence of polarization.

We investigate an inflationary overlapping generations model where households predict future inflation rates by running a least squares regression of inflation rates or prices on their past levels. We critically examine the results on learning equilibria obtained by Bullard (1994) and Schönhofer (1999) in this framework. They show that an increase in the money growth rate may lead to limit cycles and endogenous business cycles. We suggest an alternative estimation procedure, that starts from the same perceived law of motion, but is more sensible from an econometrician's point of view. We prove that for this estimation procedure there is global convergence on the monetary steady for a large set of savings functions. We also study, in a heterogeneous agents framework, evolutionary competition between the two estimation procedures, where the fraction of the population using a certain estimation procedure is determined by its past average quadratic forecast error. Interestingly, the more sensible estimation procedure is not always able to drive out the other estimation procedure, and endogenous business cycles may still be observed in this heterogeneous world

How does impatience affect job search? More impatient workers search less intensively and set a lower reservation wage. The effect on the exit rate from unemployment is unclear. In this paper we show that, if agents have exponential time preferences, the reservation wage effect dominates for sufficiently patient individuals, so increases in impatience lead to higher exit rates. The opposite is true for agents with hyperbolic time preferences: more impatient workers search less and exit unemployment later. Using two large longitudinal data sets, we find that various measures of impatience are negatively correlated with search effort and the exit rate from unemployment, and are orthogonal to reservation wages. Overall, impatience has a large effect on job search outcomes in the direction predicted by the hyperbolic discounting model.

Some recent research indicates that the occurrence of indeterminacy in mod- els with externalities may be overstated because these models ignore agents’ heterogene- ity. We consider a neoclassical two-sector growth model with technological externalities. Agents are heterogenous in respect to their shares of the initial stock of capital and in labor endowments. We find that the sign of the effect of inequality on indeterminacy is not pinned down by the standard properties of preferences. However, when the in- verse of absolute risk aversion is a convex (respectively concave) function homogeneity (heterogeneity) tends to neutralize the external effects and eliminate indeterminacy.

This paper provides theoretical foundations for when individual and aggregate wealth accumulation increase as earnings risk increases. Stated in terms of a simple picture, the problem addressed in this paper is to find sufficient conditions such that the pattern in Figure 1 holds. Figure 1 describes a situation in which an individual's expected wealth accumulation profile is weakly greater at each age over the life cycle whenever the individual faces one earnings process that is riskier than another earnings process, other things equal. Two important open questions can be answered by finding sufficient conditions for the pattern in Figure 1 to occur. First, there is the question of when theory predicts that households that face more earnings risk have more expected wealth accumulation at any point in the life cycle than households that face less earnings risk. The development of such a theory would be helpful as there is a sizeable empirical literature related to this question which is surveyed by Browning and Lusardi (1996). Second, there is the question of when theory predicts that aggregate wealth accumulation increases as earnings risk increases. Much of the interest in the precautionary savings literature is based on the possibility that an important part of aggregate wealth is due to uninsured earnings risk. This question can also be answered with Figure 1. The idea is to treat the expected wealth profile of one individual as the realized average wealth profile of a large number of similarly situated individuals. The law of large numbers justifies this when shocks are independent across individuals and, thus, earnings risk is idiosyncratic. Since aggregate wealth holding is a weighted sum of the average wealth holdings of individuals at different ages, an upward shift of the expected wealth profile of all agents then implies that aggregate wealth holding increases with increases in earnings risk, other things equal. This paper provides the first general answer to when the pattern in Figure 1 occurs in the context of a multi-period model with independent earnings shocks. The answer is given at two levels: in terms of properties of the decision rule for savings (i.e. the savings function) and in terms of preferences. A savings function maps an individual's current state (e.g. current wealth and earnings) and age into savings or wealth carried into the next model period, given a specific earnings process. Since economists are familiar with the merits of sufficient conditions stated in terms of preferences, I will try to motivate why sufficient conditions stated in terms of the savings function are interesting. First, they are widely applicable. They apply to theories where savings decisions maximize a utility function or are given by a rule-of-thumb. They also apply to models where there is wage risk and there are both consumption-saving and labour-leisure decisions. Second, in so far as the savings function can be estimated, it is useful for an empirical

This paper axiomatizes an intertemporal version of multiple-priors utility. A central axiom is dynamic consistency, which leads to a recursive structure for utility, to ‘rectangular’ sets of priors and to prior-by-prior Bayesian updating as the updating rule for such sets of priors. It is argued that dynamic consistency is intuitive in a wide range of situations and that the model is consistent with a rich set of possibilities for dynamic behavior under ambiguity.

Using experimental data of children and their mothers, this paper explores the intergenerational relationship of impatience. The child’s impatience stems from a delay of gratification experiment. Mother’s impatience has been assessed by a choice task where the mothers faced trade-offs between a smaller-sooner and a larger-later monetary reward with a delay of six or twelve months. The findings demonstrate an intergenerational relationship in short-run decision making. Controlling for mother’s and child’s characteristics the child’s impatience at preschool age is significantly correlated with the six month maternal reservation interest rate.

This paper analyses the effects of so-called "green" tax reforms on a small, open economy producing an imperfect substitute for foreign goods, using an intertemporal general equilibrium model. The labour market is characterised by union wage setting, and a fixed exchange rate implies wage rigidity and involuntary unemployment. The long run effects on instantaneous utility, employment and the stock of real and financial capital of a revenue neutral increase in the tax on fossil fuels combined with a) lump sum rebating or b) change in the labour income tax rate, are discussed. Due to the changes in instantaneous utility during the time path following the implementation of the tax reform, the total welfare effect may be positive even with a reduction in long run consumption. The total welfare effect is in general more positive (or less negative) with wage tax reduction than lump-sum rebating.

Published online: 02 April 2014. This paper studies optimal fiscal policy, in the form of taxation and the allocation of tax revenues between infrastructure and environmental investment, in a general-equilibrium growth model with endogenous subjective discounting. A green spending reform, defined as a reallocation of government expenditures toward the environment, can procure a double dividend by raising growth and improving environmental conditions, although the environment does not impact the production technology. Also, endogenous Ramsey fiscal policy eliminates the possibility of an “environmental and economic poverty trap.” In contrast to the case of exogenous discounting, green spending reforms are the optimal response of the Ramsey government to a rise in the agents' environmental concerns.

This paper quantifies how the welfare costs of the U.S. Great Recession are distributed across borrowing and saving U.S. households. For this purpose, we use a calibrated dynamic general equilibrium model of housing and household debt with shocks to aggregate income and shocks to the financial intermediation sector. The model matches the boom-bust cycle in house prices, the dynamics of household mortgage debt, and the increase in wealth inequality observed in the U.S. between 2001-2013. We find larger welfare costs of the Great Recession for borrowers than for savers. Borrowers experience a larger drop in consumption than savers who relatively benefit from a redistribution of housing wealth during the recession. We show that the size of this redistribution mechanism would have been significantly lower if (i) mortgage spreads would have remained at the low pre-crisis levels during the recession or if (ii) aggregate leverage would have remained at pre-2001 levels.

The current unsustainable growth of the world economy is largely a consequence of the crisis of social capital experienced by much of the world’s population. Declining social capital leads economies towards excessive growth, because people seek, in economic affluence, compensation for emotional distress and loss of resources caused by scarce social and affective relationships. To slow down economic growth requires an increase in social capital that is a fundamental contributor to happiness. From a wide range of possible approaches to increasing present happiness, this article suggests policies that would shift the economy to a more sustainable path. It focuses on a more politically sustainable set of proposals for a green ‘new deal’ than some of those currently under discussion.

This paper advances a structural inter-temporal model of labour supply that is able to simulate the dynamics of labour supply in a continuous setting and to circumvent two main drawbacks of most of the existing models. The first limitation is the inability to incorporate individual heterogeneity as every agent is sharing the same parameters of the utility function. The second one is the strong assumption that individuals make decisions in a world of perfect certainty. Essentially, this paper offers an extension of marginal-utility-of-wealth-constant labour supply functions known as "Frisch functions" under certainty and uncertainty with homogenous and heterogeneous preferences. Two alternative models are proposed for capturing individual heterogeneity. First, a "fixed effect vector decomposition" model, which allows the individual specific effects to be correlated with the explanatory variables included in the labour supply model, and second, a mixed fixed and random coefficient model, which incorporates a higher degree of individual heterogeneity by specifying individual coefficients. Uncertainty is controlled for by introducing an expectation correction into the model. The validation of each simulation model is realized in comparison with the standard Heckman model. The lifetime models based on the fixed effect vector decomposition yield the most stable and unbiased simulation results, both under certainty and uncertainty. Due to its improved accuracy and stability, this lifetime labour supply model is particularly suitable for enhancing the performance of the pension models, thus providing a better reference for policymaking.

We study exchanges between three overlapping generations with non-dynastic altruism. The middleaged choose informal care provided to their parents and education expenditures for their children. The young enjoy their education, while the old may leave a bequest to their children. Within each period the three generations play a "game" inspired by Becker’s (1974, 1991) rotten kids framework, with the added features that the rotten kids turn into the altruistic parent in the next period and that parents invest in the education of their children. We show that Becker’s rotten kids theorem holds for the single period game in that informal aid is set according to an efficient rule. However, education is distorted upwards. In the stationary equilibrium the levels of both transfers are inefficient: education is too large and informal aid is too low.

The paper assumes a continuum of two period-lived agents; agents are identical except for the inherited income. Young agents optimally allocate their inherited income between consumption and investment in human capital in a stochastic environment. In the second period they receive a wage proportional to the accumulated human capital and invest in offspring. Two main results are provided: a low earning per unit of human capital leads the economy to converge to a stationary income distribution whatever the initial distribution. Viceversa, for a sufficently high wage an endogenous growth is at work and the income distribution dynamics depends on the initial conditions. In this case several redistributive policies are analized.

Since Hotelling's seminal paper on the optimal depletion of exhaustible resources, much has been published; yet confusion remains about whether scarcity rent and price increase or decrease as a resource is depleted when costs tend to rise with depletion. We show that Hotelling's fundamental results of rising scarcity rent and price paths are sustained and that the path of scarcity rent converges on the r per cent rule, provided the objective function is concave. Predictions of non-monotonic or declining scarcity rent paths are due to implicit assumptions that lead to a non-concave objective function. We identify the sources of these non-concavities. JEL Classification: Q30, D90, C60 Prix, rente de rarete et une regle modifiee du r-pourcent pour les ressources non renouvelables. Malgre la volumineuse litterature specialisee qui a fleuri depuis qu'Hotelling a ecrit son memoire fondateur sur l'epuisement optimal des ressources renouvelables, une grande confusion regne toujours quand il faut etablir si la rente de rarete et le prix augmentent ou chutent a proportion que la ressource s'epuise quand les couts tendent a croitre avec l'epuisement. Ce memoire montre que les resultats fondamentaux obtenus par Hotelling quant aux sentiers de croissance de la rente de rarete et du prix tiennent toujours, et que le sentier de croissance de la rente de rarete converge vers la regle du r-pourcent pourvu que la fonction objective soit concave. Les predictions de sentiers de croissance non monotone ou de declin de la rente de rarete presentees dans la litterature specialisee sont attribuables a des postulats implicites qui engendrent une fonction objective non concave. Les auteurs identifient les sources de ces non-concavites.

We experimentally study the e¤ect of time on altruism. By postponing payments in a standard Dictator game, subjects allocate a future payment between themselves and others. Since both the payoffs of the Dictator and the Receiver are delayed until the same time, standard intertemporal utility maximization would predict that waiting time should not affect the Dictator's choice. In this respect, we observe that Dictators' decisions are not affected, as long as the time interval between the decision and payment is not large. On the other hand, for large time gaps, subjectsbecome more self-interested.

An economic model of fertility choice is presented and discussed in which the utility level of agents depends upon their consumption, the number of children they have, and upon the consumption of their children. Parents are altruistic toward their children, but in a more limited sense than in the fertility model presented by Becker and Barro in 1988, in which the utility of parents depends upon the utility of their children and therefore indirectly upon the consumption and fertility decisions made by all subsequent generations. The concept of a bequest equilibrium is used to solve the nondynastic model considered. The steady state birth rate was found to be lower in the nondynastic model than in the Becker-Barro model. However, the key qualitative predictions concerning the dynamic behavior of fertility are surprisingly similar in both models.

It is well known that, in OLG economies with life-cycle saving and exogenous growth, competitive equilibria will in general fail to achieve optimality and may even be dynamically ineefficient. This is a consequence of individuals accumulating amounts of physical capital that differ from the level which would maximize welfare along a balanced growth path (the Golden Rule). With human capital, a second potential source of departure from optimality arises, to wit: individuals may not choose the correct amount of education investment. However, the Golden Rule concept, widely used in exogenous growth frameworks, has not found its way into endogenous growth models. In this paper, we propose to recover the Golden Rule of physical and also human capital accumulation. The optimal policy to decentralize the Golden Rule balanced growth path when there are no constraints for individuals to finance their education investments is also characterized. It is shown that it involves positive pensions and negative education subsidies (i.e., taxes).

This paper considers an overlapping generations model of economic growth populated by two types of individuals. Competitive types compare future consumption (i.e. wealth) with the mean. Self-sufficient types derive utility simply from their own consumption and do not compare themselves with others. I derive a condition under which the utility (happiness) of both types increases when the economy is populated by a larger share of competitive types. In the long-run the condition is always fulfilled when the economy is capable of economic growth. The reason for this phenomenon is that competitive types generate higher savings and thus higher aggregate capital stock and income per capita, which raises utility of both types. I show that the result is robust to the consideration of endogenous work effort and that a sufficiently high share of competitive types in a society can be inevitable for long-run economic growth to exist.

In this paper I investigate the nexus between life time utility (life satisfaction) and income predicted by the standard model of endogenous economic growth under different behavioral assumptions. The solution rationalizes why the empirical association between income and life satisfaction is approximately log-linear. I show that the solution is observationally equivalent when individuals compare their consumption (i) with others, (ii) with their own past consumption achievements, and (iii) not at all (ordinary preferences). This finding suggests that the observed slope of the income-life satisfaction curve is uninformative about human behavior driven by reference-dependent utility. In particular, the hypothesis that the flattening of the life satisfaction curve at high income levels indicates that people are comparing their consumption “too much” with others or own past achievements is not supported by the work-horse model of endogenous economic growth.

On the one hand, the adoption of polluting technologies can enhance the factor productivity; on the other hand, pollution lowers the stock of human capital by weakening physical and mental performances, and shortening the life expectancy at the end. To capture the impact of pollution on economic growth, we compute the optimal policy in a continuous-time endogenous growth model a la Lucas (1988). The concavity properties we consider, not only ensure the uniqueness of solution but also play a fundamental role in comparative statics and local dynamics.

This paper considers a one-sector economic growth model with several infinitely - lived heterogeneous households, who differ both in the discount factors as well as preferences over consumption. Unlike the extreme form of borrowing constraint observed in the classical Ramsey model, recently surveyed in Becker (2006), we allow limited borrowing by the households and prove the existence of a perfect foresight equilibrium. We also show that irrespective of production technology employed by the firms, the capital stock sequence converges to the steady state stock and from some time onward all impatient households are in the maximum borrowing state, whereas the most patient household owns entire capital stock and the debts of all other households.

This paper studies the consequences of labor-market frictions for the real effects of steady inflation when cash is required for households' consumption purchases and firms' wage payments. Money growth may generate a positive real effect by encouraging vacancy creation and raising job matches. This may result in a positive optimal rate of inflation, particularly in an economy with moderate money injections to firms and with nonnegligible labor-market frictions in which wage bargains are not efficient. This main finding holds for a wide range of money injection schemes, with alternative cash constraints, and in a second-best world with pre-existing distortionary taxes.

This paper combines the standard incomplete markets model of uninsurable idiosyncratic risks and borrowing constraints with the Arrow/Romer approach to endogenous growth to analyze the interaction of risk, growth, and inequality, the latter also endogenously determined in equilibrium. We derive conditions on existence and nonexistence of balanced growth paths. Major results include that growth, inequality, and risk are positively related in our model, but we also identify a hump–shaped relationship between welfare and risk, indicating a tradeoff relationship between risk–pooling and growth in the determination of welfare. We employ the prototypical policy implications of the underlying growth model (i.e. subsidizing capital returns) and find that the tax–transfer scheme positively affects growth while simultaneously reducing wealth inequality in the economy. The benefits and burdens of the underlying policy are unequally distributed, which raises the issue of politico–economic equilibria. We provide results on majority voting, finding that that the median voter prefers less than optimal subsidies on investment. Interestingly, the society might even vote against a policy providing full insurance against idiosyncratic risk, because welfare losses of lower growth more than offset welfare gains from lower risk.

We consider infinite horizon economies populated by a continuum of agents who are subject to idiosyncratic shocks. This framework contains models of saving and capital accumulation with incomplete markets in the spirit of works by Bewley, Aiyagari, and Huggett, and models of entry, exit and industry dynamics in the spirit of Hopenhayn's work as special cases. Robust and easy-to-apply comparative statics results are established with respect to exogenous parameters as well as various kinds of changes in the Markov processes governing the law of motion of the idiosyncratic shocks. These results complement the existing literature which uses simulations and numerical analysis to study this class of models and are illustrated using a number of examples.