Debt, deficits, and age-specific mortality

This paper develop's an overlapping agents model with age-specific mortality rates. The analytical framework also nests Blanchard's (1985, Journal of Political Economy 82, 1095-1117) "perpetual youth" model as a special, though perhaps not realistic, case. With age specific mortality rates, youth is "fleeting' " Using standard hyperbolic functions, the model with fleeting youth is able to closely replicate the empirical relation between age and mortality. The steady-state model is used to examine the comparative implications of deficit finance, and age-specific mortality is shown to alter the nonRicardian properties of the model. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science (USA).