An overlapping generations model of an exchange economy is considered, with individuals having a finite expected life-span. As the model is designed to be a fully playable game, conditions concerning birth, death, inheritance and bequests are fully specified.

A small but growing body of literature uses overlapping generations (OLG) models to study environmental policy for long-lived problems such as climate change. An OLG model, unlike the infinitely lived representative agent model, distinguishes between impatience with respect to one’s own future utility, and attitudes toward successors’ utility. I discuss the problem of time inconsistency, the ro...

Abstract: We reappraise the significance of indeterminacy in overlappinggenerations models. In any of Gale’s examples of locally-indeterminate (nonlocally-unique) equilibrium, for instance, judiciously splitting each of Gale’s goods into 2 close substitutes restricts that indeterminacy to each period’s distribution of consumption between those substitutes. In particular, prices, interest rates,...

Trade changes incentives to protect an open-access natural resource. In an OLG setting, the capital asset market transfers policy-induced future gains and losses to the current asset owner. The asset market creates incentives for agents currently alive to protect the natural resource under autarchy. Trade reverses these incentives. In a dynamic political economy, resource policies in both the o...

We imbed a classic fishery model, where the optimal policy follows a Most Rapid Approach Path to a steady state, into an overlapping generations setting. The current generation discounts future generations’ utility flows at a rate possibly different from the pure rate of time preference used to discount their own utility flows. The resulting model has non-constant discount rates, leading to tim...

THE OVERLAPPING-GENERATIONS (OLG) model, introduced first by Allais (1947) and Samuelson (1958), is one of the two major workhorses for macroeconomic and financial modeling of open-ended dynamic economies. Following developments in the study of two-period economies, the OLG model has been extended to cover stochastic economies with production and possibly incomplete financial markets. As is the...

The paper analyzes optimal time-consistent taxation in an overlapping generations model with two-period lived households. The government chooses tax rates and borrowing to finance an exogenous stream of expenditures. It cannot commit to future policies, so announced policies that are not time consistent are not credible. Dynamic programming is used to derive Markov-perfect equilibria. In contra...