Mother or Child? Intra-Household Redistribution under Gender-Asymmetric Altruism In developing societies, social norms typically ascribe differential weights to paternal, maternal and communal (or state) contributions to children’s expenses. Individuals internalize these valuations. I examine a Cournot model of voluntary contribution to children’s goods in a two-adult household, where both spou...

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling, but more strikingly, the importance of marriage at different points in the life cycle has changed, re...

We extend the discussion of redistributive politics across electoral systems to allow for taxation to be distortionary. We allow politicians to choose any tax rate between zero and unity and then redistribute the money collected. We build on the model put forward by Myerson (1993) and Lizzeri and Persico (2001 and 2005) to show that the use of distortionnary taxation can be understood as an ana...

In this paper we study the life cycle locational choices of heterogeneous households and characterize the dynamics of metropolitan areas. We develop an overlapping generations model for households in of a system of multiple jurisdictions. At each point of time households choose among the finite number of jurisdictions, pick consumption and housing plans, and vote over education expenditures and...

Complex Tax Incentives: An Experimental Investigation How does the tax system’s complexity affect people’s reaction to tax changes? To answer this question, we conduct a real-effort experiment in which subjects receive a piece rate and face a set of taxes. In one treatment the tax system is simple; in the other treatment it is highly complex. The payoff-maximizing effort level and the incentive...

Cooperative Models in Action: Simulation of a Nash-Bargaining Model of Household Labor Supply with Taxation Several theoretical contributions, starting with McElroy and Horney (1981) and Manser and Brown (1980), have suggested to model household behavior as a Nash-bargaining game. Since then, very few attempts have been made to operationalize cooperative models of household labor supply for pol...

This paper analyses the fiscal pressure from population ageing using an intertemporal CGE model, applied to Australia, and compares the results with those of a recent governmentcommissioned study. The latter study uses an alternative modelling approach based on extrapolation rather than optimizing behaviour of consumers and firms. The deadweight losses from the fiscal pressure caused by populat...

By inverting Saez (2002)’s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize the redistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal) social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time and show great stability despite profound changes in market incomes and important …scal reforms over the period. Results are robust to numer...

To assess the impact of taxation on the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB), most studies consider the average consumer. Individual consumption is, however, very heterogeneous. In this paper, we propose a three-step methodology to assess the impact of SSB taxation on individual consumption. First, we use a disaggregation method to recover individual consumption from observed househol...

This paper constructs a quantitative lifecycle model with uninsurable labor income and aggregate housing return risk to assess how Korean households make saving and portfolio allocation decisions. The model incorporates the special roles housing plays in the portfolio of households: collateral, a source of service flows, as well as a source of potential capital gains or losses. In the model, a ...