Optimal paternalistic health and human capital policies

Abstract

We study optimal human and health linear policies when there is a paternalistic motive to overcome present bias problems of agents with heterogeneous cognitive skills. The paternalistic intervention rewards individuals for physical capital accumulation and the combined e ect of health and human capital on future earnings. Our results highlight a novel e ect of paternalistic policies due to the interaction between present-biased preferences and cognitive skills. We illustrate numerically that this policy package is the most e ective and we analyze the relevance of agent's cognitive skills and present-biased preferences for the determination of rst-best and constrained rst-best optimal policies.