Between 1970 and 1990, the share of elderly widows living alone grew by 23.2% in the United States, whereas those living with their children decreased by a similar amount. We pose a variety of models for determining the living arrangements in which living together increases consumption because of economies of scale and may also provide utility directly. We estimate these models using the 1970 data and obtain an excellent fit. The estimated models predict that changes in the incomes of both the widow and her offspring generate three-quarters of the increase in the number of widows living alone. Copyright � (2009) by the Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

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We propose a theoretical model to account for the negative relationship between tax evasion and economic development.More precisely, we integrate tax morale into a dynamic OLG model of tax evasion. Tax morale is modeled as a social norm for tax compliance. We show that accounting for such nonpecuniary costs of evasion may explain (a) why the share of evaded taxes over GDP decreases when countries grow and (b) that tax morale is positively correlated with the level of GDP per capita. Finally, a higher tax rate increases aggregate evasion and the number of evaders when taxpayers decisions are interdependent.

This study investigates the asymmetric unemployment-output tradeoff in the Eurozone.Building upon the augmented Okun's law framework, the relationships between unemployment and output cannot be correctly specified in the static linear, static asymmetric and dynamic linear regressions. By contrast, the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model is well-specified and in this case indicates that the nature of Okun's law is asymmetric.For the Eurozone, the NARDL estimates demonstrate that labour markets quickly respond to cyclical outputs in a short period, while the adjustments towards new equilibrium become weak in the long run. Furthermore, the cross-sectional analysis of long run asymmetries indicates that government spending and trade balance are key factors affecting the asymmetric unemployment-output tradeoff. Thus, these results seem to suggest that, in spite of the fact that member states lack monetary sovereignty, flexible application of fiscal reforms or labour market reforms could help to reduce asymmetric effects. JEL Codes: C22, E32, J64.Keywords: unemployment-output tradeoff, nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL), asymmetry determinants. * We thank Matthew Greenwood-Nimmo and Hanan Naser for their insightful comments on a previous version. The remaining errors are our own.

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Spousal and survivor pensions are two important provisions of the US Social Security pension system. In this paper, we assess the impact of these benefits on the female employment rate in the context of a full life‐cycle model in which households decide on female labor supply and savings. One important aspect of our model is that we allow for returns to labor market experience so that participation decisions affect not only current earnings and Social Security pension eligibility but also future earnings. We quantify the effect on female labor supply and on household inequality of (i) removing spousal benefit, (ii) removing both spousal and survivor pension benefits, and (iii) extending from 35 to 40 the number of periods of the working career that are considered when calculating the retired worker's pension. We find that reforms (i) and (ii) significantly increase female employment throughout the life cycle, whereas reform (iii) has a very mild effect. The effect of (ii) on income inequality in older household is large, whereas the effect on consumption inequality is small. All three reforms have substantial effects on Social Security expenditure and fiscal revenues.

A benchmark result in the political economy of taxation is that the degree of redistribution is positively linked to income inequality. However, empirical evidence supporting such a relationship turns out to be mixed. This paper shows how these different empirical reactions can be rationalized within a simple model of tax avoidance and costly tax enforcement. By focussing on structure induced equilibria in which taxpayers vote over the size of the income tax and the level of tax enforcement, we show that higher inequality may well decrease the extent of redistribution, depending on two opposing effects: the standard political effect and a negative tax base effect working through increases in the average level of tax avoidance and the share of enforcement expenditures in total tax revenue.

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