William P. Wharton Trust

Public Employee Pensions and Municipal Insolvency

Abstract This paper studies how municipal governments jointly manage spending, credit market borrowing, and a public employee pension system. I model governments as levered investors who must meet non-defaultable pension obligations and may value government spending more than cit...

What Has Wellbeing Got to Do With It? Artificial Intelligence, the Hybrid Tipping Zone, and the Crisis of Human Flourishing

Wellbeing economics has spent decades challenging the assumption that income, output, and human flourishing move together automatically. Artificial intelligence brings this familiar economic question into a new setting. AI can raise task-level efficiency, improve access to knowle...