IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/15540.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Optimal Sustainable Intergenerational Insurance

Author

Listed:
  • Lancia, Francesco
  • Russo, Alessia
  • Worrall, Tim S

Abstract

How should successive generations insure each other when the enforcement of transfers between them is limited? This paper examines transfers that maximize the expected discounted utility of all generations subject to a participation constraint for each generation. The resulting optimal intergenerational insurance is history dependent even when the environment is stationary. Consequently, consumption is heteroskedastic and autocorrelated across generations. The optimal intergenerational insurance arrangement is interpreted as a pay-as-you-go social security scheme with means testing and a mixture of flat-rate and contributory-related elements. With logarithmic preferences, the pension received when old depends on the contribution rate paid when young.

Suggested Citation

  • Lancia, Francesco & Russo, Alessia & Worrall, Tim S, 2020. "Optimal Sustainable Intergenerational Insurance," CEPR Discussion Papers 15540, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15540
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP15540
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mariacristina De Nardi & Giulio Fella & Gonzalo Paz-Pardo, 2020. "Nonlinear Household Earnings Dynamics, Self-Insurance, and Welfare," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 18(2), pages 890-926.
    2. Krueger, Dirk & Lustig, Hanno, 2010. "When is market incompleteness irrelevant for the price of aggregate risk (and when is it not)?," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 145(1), pages 1-41, January.
    3. Zheng Song & Kjetil Storesletten & Yikai Wang & Fabrizio Zilibotti, 2015. "Sharing High Growth across Generations: Pensions and Demographic Transition in China," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 7(2), pages 1-39, April.
    4. Alessandro Dovis & Mikhail Golosov & Ali Shourideh, 2016. "Political Economy of Sovereign Debt: A Theory of Cycles of Populism and Austerity," NBER Working Papers 21948, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Alvarez, Fernando & Jermann, Urban J, 2001. "Quantitative Asset Pricing Implications of Endogenous Solvency Constraints," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 14(4), pages 1117-1151.
    6. Paul A. Samuelson, 1958. "An Exact Consumption-Loan Model of Interest with or without the Social Contrivance of Money," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 66(6), pages 467-467.
    7. Thomas F. Cooley & Jorge Soares, 1999. "A Positive Theory of Social Security Based on Reputation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 107(1), pages 135-160, February.
    8. Laurence Ball & N. Gregory Mankiw, 2007. "Intergenerational Risk Sharing in the Spirit of Arrow, Debreu, and Rawls, with Applications to Social Security Design," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 115(4), pages 523-547, August.
    9. Jonathan P. Thomas & Tim Worrall, 2007. "Unemployment Insurance under Moral Hazard and Limited Commitment: Public versus Private Provision," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 9(1), pages 151-181, February.
    10. Timothy Christensen, 2014. "Nonparametric Stochastic Discount Factor Decomposition," Papers 1412.4428, arXiv.org, revised May 2017.
    11. Timothy M. Christensen, 2017. "Nonparametric Stochastic Discount Factor Decomposition," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 85, pages 1501-1536, September.
    12. Tobias Broer, 2013. "The Wrong Shape of Insurance? What Cross-Sectional Distributions Tell Us about Models of Consumption Smoothing," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 5(4), pages 107-140, October.
    13. Martin, Ian W. R. & Ross, Stephen A., 2019. "Notes on the yield curve," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(3), pages 689-702.
    14. Shengxing Zhang & Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, 2017. "Intangibles, Inequality and Stagnation," 2017 Meeting Papers 1414, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    15. Andreoni, James, 1989. "Giving with Impure Altruism: Applications to Charity and Ricardian Equivalence," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(6), pages 1447-1458, December.
    16. Pamela Labadie, 1986. "Comparative Dynamics and Risk Premia in an Overlapping Generations Model," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 53(1), pages 139-152.
    17. Marco Bassetto, 2008. "Political Economy of Taxation in an Overlapping-Generations Economy," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 11(1), pages 18-43, January.
    18. Fernando Alvarez & Urban J. Jermann, 2005. "Using Asset Prices to Measure the Persistence of the Marginal Utility of Wealth," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 73(6), pages 1977-2016, November.
    19. Manuelli, Rodolfo, 1990. "Existence and optimality of currency equilibrium in stochastic overlapping generations models: The pure endowment case," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 51(2), pages 268-294, August.
    20. Greg Kaplan & Giovanni L. Violante, 2010. "How Much Consumption Insurance beyond Self-Insurance?," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(4), pages 53-87, October.
    21. Campbell, John Y. & Feldstein, Martin (ed.), 2000. "Risk Aspects of Investment-Based Social Security Reform," National Bureau of Economic Research Books, University of Chicago Press, edition 1, number 9780226092553.
    22. Peled, Dan, 1984. "Stationary pareto optimality of stochastic asset equilibria with overlapping generations," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 396-403, December.
    23. Rao Aiyagari, S. & Peled, Dan, 1991. "Dominant root characterization of Pareto optimality and the existence of optimal equilibria in stochastic overlapping generations models," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 54(1), pages 69-83, June.
    24. Pamela Labadie, 2004. "Aggregate risk sharing and equivalent financial mechanisms in an endowment economy of incomplete participation," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 24(4), pages 789-809, November.
    25. Diamond, P. A., 1977. "A framework for social security analysis," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 275-298, December.
    26. Narayana R. Kocherlakota, 1996. "Implications of Efficient Risk Sharing without Commitment," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 63(4), pages 595-609.
    27. Michele Boldrin & Aldo Rustichini, 2000. "Political Equilibria with Social Security," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 3(1), pages 41-78, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Dimitrov, 2022. "Intergenerational Risk Sharing with Market Liquidity Risk," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 22-028/VI, Tinbergen Institute.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Borovička, Jaroslav & Stachurski, John, 2021. "Stability of equilibrium asset pricing models: A necessary and sufficient condition," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 193(C).
    2. Narayana R. Kocherlakota, 2023. "Infinite Debt Rollover in Stochastic Economies," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 91(5), pages 1629-1658, September.
    3. Gaetano Bloise & Pietro Reichlin, 2023. "Low safe interest rates: A case for dynamic inefficiency?," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 51, pages 633-656, December.
    4. Casamatta, G. & Batté, L., 2016. "The Political Economy of Population Aging," Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, in: Piggott, John & Woodland, Alan (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 0, pages 381-444, Elsevier.
    5. Dirk Krueger & Felix Kubler, 2006. "Pareto-Improving Social Security Reform when Financial Markets are Incomplete!?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(3), pages 737-755, June.
    6. Beetsma, Roel & Komada, Oliwia & Makarski, Krzysztof & Tyrowicz, Joanna, 2021. "The political (in)stability of funded social security," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 133(C).
    7. Gabrielle Demange, 2005. "On sustainable pay as you go systems," PSE Working Papers halshs-00590859, HAL.
    8. Bishnu, Monisankar & Wang, Min, 2017. "The political intergenerational welfare state," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 93-110.
    9. Dirk Krueger, 2006. "Public Insurance against Idiosyncratic and Aggregate Risk: The Case of Social Security and Progressive Income Taxation," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo Group, vol. 52(4), pages 587-620, December.
    10. Tim Worrall & Alessia Russo & Francesco Lancia, 2017. "Sustainable Intergenerational Insurance," 2017 Meeting Papers 319, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    11. Eisei Ohtaki & Hiroyuki Ozaki, 2014. "Optimality in a Stochastic OLG Model with Ambiguity," Working Papers e069, Tokyo Center for Economic Research.
    12. Georges Casamatta & L. Batté, 2016. "The Political Economy of Population Aging," Post-Print hal-02520521, HAL.
    13. Eisei Ohtaki, 2023. "Optimality in an OLG model with nonsmooth preferences," International Journal of Economic Theory, The International Society for Economic Theory, vol. 19(3), pages 611-659, September.
    14. Ohtaki, Eisei, 2014. "Tractable graphical device for analyzing stationary stochastic OLG economies," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 16-26.
    15. de Mendonça, Helder Ferreira & Tiberto, Bruno Pires, 2014. "Public debt and social security: Level of formality matters," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 490-507.
    16. Pamela Labadie, 2007. "Anonymity and Individual Risk," 2007 Meeting Papers 637, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    17. Zhengyang Jiang & Hanno Lustig & Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh & Mindy Z. Xiaolan, 2020. "Manufacturing Risk-free Government Debt," NBER Working Papers 27786, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Tetsuo Ono, 2014. "Economic Growth and the Politics of Intergenerational Redistribution," Discussion Papers in Economics and Business 14-17-Rev., Osaka University, Graduate School of Economics, revised Sep 2015.
    19. Picard, Pierre M. & Worrall, Tim, 2020. "Currency areas and voluntary transfers," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    20. Wigniolle, B., 2014. "Optimism, pessimism and financial bubbles," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 188-208.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Intergenerational insurance; Limited commitment; Risk sharing; Social security; Stochastic overlapping generations;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D64 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Altruism; Philanthropy; Intergenerational Transfers
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • H55 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Social Security and Public Pensions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15540. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.