The Need of an Intergender Contract in Overlapping Generations (OLG) Models

This paper extends Paul A. Samuelson’s 1958 article An exact consumption-loan model of interest with or without the social contrivance of money which introduced an intertemporal overlapping generations (OLG) model of a pure loan-consumption economy. From today’s perspective and from a feminist viewpoint, two features missing in Samuelson’s model are (1) the failure to acknowledge the existence of unpaid labor in the background of the classical OLG model and its extensions, and (2) the fact that the model outcome implicitly depends on the unexplained “reproduction work” (of women) to make all described intergenerational exchange possible. Adopting an empiricist point of view, we aim at improving the existing OLG model set-up in a call for gender equality and motivate the construction of a formalization of the exchange patterns between women and men.