Peter Watson: The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New

Peter Watson is an intellectual historian, who writes big, ambitious books. His previous work, The German Genius (2010) did an admirable job surveying the extraordinary flo- rescence of German intellectual thought from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It was an accessible, although lengthy, guide to not only the great names—Goethe, Gauss, Kant, Einstein—but also managed to include a host of relatively minor figures, while making sense of the whole. In The Great Divide , Watson sets himself an even more daunting task: he tries, by tracing human history from origins to the early modern period, to account for why the New World (North, Central and South America) has diverged from the Old. This divergence, in terms of civilisation and power, is what forms the ‘great divide’. Like the German Genius , then, The Great Divide is necessarily a work of synthesis, pulling together scholarship from a host of disciplines: anthropology, comparative theology, archaeology, climatology, biology, geology and history. The diversity of this list is a clue to the sources of Watson’s overall argument. The causes of the Great Divide are as much natural as social. To this extent the book is an argument about global environmental history as it relates to grand, large-scale trends in human history

Pension Reforms and Women Retirement Plans

We analyse the effects of pension reforms on the planned retirement age of women by exploiting within country variation in pension wealth across cohorts of workers in Italy after the Amato and Dini reforms of the early 1990s, which introduced a "Notionally Defined Contribution" (NDC) method for calculating pension benefits. The effect of the change in the pension regime on retirement decisions is affected by the presence of gaps in careers of women. Binding constraints related to eligibility to pensions indeed reduce the responsiveness of women to changes in pension rules. This explains why, contrary to a priori expectations, men are often found to be more reactive than women to changes in pension rules.pensions, social security wealth and accrual, gaps in careers

Non-exclusivity and adverse selection: An application to the annuity market

Using a common agency framework, we characterize possible equilibria when annuities contracts are not exclusive. We discuss theoretical and empirical implications of these equilibria. First, we show that at equilibrium prices are not linear. Then we characterize an equilibrium. We provide conditions for existence and show that this equilibrium is efficient.Menus, Common Agency, Insurance, Annuity Markets, Adverse Selection, Efficiency

Pension Reforms and Women Retirement Plans

We analyse the effects of pension reforms on the planned retirement age of women by exploiting within country variation in pension wealth across cohorts of workers in Italy after the Amato and Dini reforms of the early 1990s, which introduced a “Notionally Defined Contribution” (NDC) method for calculating pension benefits. The effect of the change in the pension regime on retirement decisions is affected by the presence of gaps in careers of women. Binding constraints related to eligibility to pensions indeed reduce the responsiveness of women to changes in pension rules. This explains why, contrary to a priori expectations, men are often found to be more reactive than women to changes in pension rules.Pensions, Social Security Wealth and Accrual, Gaps in careers

Census of Active Commercial Fishermen in Puerto Rico: 2008

The implementation of Puerto Rican Regulation No. 6768, which overhauled the existing fishery management framework, generated considerable hostility towards local managers. Among the controversial management measures adopted in 2004 were the assignment of fishing licenses based on fishing income, the establishment of closed seasons, and new minimum size restrictions for commercially valuable species. Though tensions have subsided, considerable opposition to these regulations remains. This paper provides a characterization of the current population of active small-scale fishermen, discusses their perceptions about the biological and socio-economic condition of the fishery, and describes their attitudes towards the new management framework. This study revealed that the number of active fishermen decreased from 1,731 in 1988 to 868 in 2008. Although a declining resource base was one of the main drivers behind these waning participation statistics, rising fuel costs and burdensome regulations exacerbated the rate of attrition. The majority of the fishermen were middleaged men (50 years) with moderate levels of formal education and high levels of fishing dependence which limited their employment opportunities outside the fishery. Most of the vessels were small (20 ft) and outfitted with a single outboard engine (80 hp). Hook and line and SCUBA were dominant gears because of their versatility and cost effectiveness. Fishermen suggested that their opposition to the regulations would continue unless they were afforded greater regulatory flexibility and provided with a larger role in the decision-making process. Fishermen were adamant about the need to reconsider the income reporting requirements to secure a fishing license because of the potential for losing public assistance benefits. They also objected to increasing the minimum size of many deepwater snapper (Lutjanidae) and grouper (Serranidae) species because it forced them to discard dead fish, a practice they consider wasteful since these species do not survive the ascent to the surface once hooked

Fiscal Implications of Pension Reforms in Italy

In this paper, we contribute to the current debate on the Italian pension system by analyzing the impact of social security reforms, in terms of both budgetary implications and distributional effects. This is done by simulating the effects of three hypothetical reforms, plus the effects of the 1995- reform of the Italian pension system (the so-called Dini reform). Our approach relies on the use of a semi-structural econometric model to predict retirement probabilities under different policy scenarios, so as to properly take into account the behavioral effects of the reforms. On the basis of the estimated retirement model, we develop a complete accounting exercise which includes not only changes in gross future benefits due to policy changes, but also changes in social security contributions, income taxes and value added taxes. Thus, our results provide not only estimates of the workers’ gains or losses, but also an exhaustive evaluation of the gains and losses for the government budget. We find that the reforms, particularly the Dini reform (once fully phased in), have a substantial impact on individuals’ retirement decisions and their net social security wealth, as well as substantial gains for the government finances.Social security budget, early retirement, fiscal effects of pension reforms

Youth Unemployment and Retirement of the Elderly: the Case of Italy

This paper shows that the “lump of labor” assumption fails in Italy. The direct relationship between the unemployment rate of the young and the labor force participation of the old is pro-cyclical, i.e. a higher labor force participation of the old is related to a lower unemployment rate of the young. Hence both vary with the business cycle. In order to overcome endogeneity problems in explaining unemployment of the young, we resort to a simulated variable: “the inducement to retire”, which is constructed by simulating the social security benefits. We related the unemployment rate of the young to this incentive measure and find that a higher inducement to retire is associated to a higher unemployment rate – quite the opposite of the “young-in-old-out” story.lump of labour, youth unemployment, early retirement