Is There a Social Security Tax Wedge? A Beveridgean pension scheme invariably introduces a wedge between the wage rate and the marginal take-home pay. A Bismarckian one can do so only if it is not actuarially fair, or in the presence of credit rationing. Interestingly, if the two possible sources of distortion are present at the same time, they will tend to offset each other. The distortion may...

This paper shows theoretically and empirically that an aggregate Euler equation relates the real interest rate to the growth rate of per capita consumption and the ratio of private and social security wealth plus asset income to consumption. Using the estimated Euler equation, the paper then calculates the steady-state effects of social security reform. Reforms that reduce the ratio of social s...

Why Pay Taxes When No One Else Does? In this paper we try to understand the phenomena whereby a large proportion of the population evades tax payments. We present a model which incorporates elements from the theory of information cascades with the standard model of tax evasion and analyze the connection between the decision of a potential tax evader, the number of tax evaders and the number cau...

We extend a standard overlapping-generations general-equilibrium model with idiosyncratic working ability shocks to design the optimal social security pension system. There are two main features in our approach. First, we keep track of individual social security wealth explicitly so that we can evaluate a wide range of policies, including “private accounts,” seamlessly. Second, we express our s...

Changes in the monthly pattern of Earned Income Tax Credit disbursements over the past decade identify a large macroeconomic consumption response from EITC checks. This paper recovers a large and significant MPC out of EITC disbursements based on a comprehensive array of macroeconomic data and econometric specifications. Point estimates of the contemporaneous consumption response average 0.7 an...

This paper incorporates the aging population projected by the U.S. Social Security Administration to a heterogeneous-agent OLG model with idiosyncratic wage shocks and analyzes its effects on individual households, the government budget, and the overall economy. The fiscal gap caused by the demographic change is 2.94% of GDP under the intermediate projection. The effect of the aging population ...

This paper develops and applies a new estimation technique for distinguishing transitory and permanent price and income elasticities of charitable giving using panel data. Twelve-year individual averages of income and deductions are combined with information on legislated changes in tax schedules, to construct instruments for permanent price and income variation. Unlike the previous literature,...

Analyzing a homogenous household setting with endogenous fertility and endogenous labor supply, we demonstrate that moving from joint taxation to individual taxation and adapting child benefits so as to keep fertility constant entails a Pareto improvement. The change is associated with an increase in labor supply and consumption and a reduction of the marginal income tax, while the child benefi...

Intergenerational Analysis of Social Interaction We explore the relationship between the social interaction of parents and their offspring from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Our theoretical framework establishes possible explanations for the intergenerational transfer of social interaction whereby the social interaction of the parent may influence that of their offspring and vice ...

There is extensive evidence that married people are, on average, healthier than their unmarried counterparts. It is unclear how much this positive correlation can be explained by the selection of healthier people into marriage. In this paper, I estimate the effect of marriage relative to cohabitation on health and disability. I control for selection into marriage by instrumenting marital status...