The Option Value Model In The Retirement Literature: The Trade-Off Between Computational Complexity And Predictive Validity

This study gives an overview of retirement modelling, starting from the single-period consumption/leisure model up to the recent life-cycle multiple-decisions and joint retirement models, paying particular attention to the role played by the option value model in the economic literature on retirement. The option value model was initially interpreted as a sub-optimal solution of the dynamic programming rule. But its simpler implementation and similar theoretical background soon attracted economists’ attention to the trade-off between computational complexity and predictive validity in retirement modelling. Supporters of the option value model underlined how “complex specifications may presume computational facility that is beyond the grasp of most real people ...” (Lumsdaine, Stock, and Wise, 1992). Moreover, they provided evidence that the option value model was at least as good as the dynamic programming in terms of predictive validity

Natural right constitutionalism : a theory of political liberalism expounded from contemporary Thomistic resources

This thesis outlines a species of political liberalism and an understanding of human rights developed from contemporary interpretations of Thomas Aquinas’s moral, legal and political theory. Working from a reading of Aquinas’s ethics that stresses both its eudaimonism and the capacity of practical reason to immediately apprehend certain human goods, the work builds on this ethical understanding by propounding a substantive approach to justice and natural right in the legal-political domain. It is argued that a Thomistic conception of justice and natural right is consistent with the notion of subjective human rights, including both fundamental human rights and certain ‘liberty’ or ‘choice’ rights. The thesis demonstrates that Aquinas’s innovative approach to justice and the political common good is useful in addressing key points in debates in political theory on human rights practice, ideal theory and forms of social criticism. Such an approach to natural right is developed into a particular species of political liberalism, based on the genus type put forward by John Rawls and Jacques Maritain before him. The work justifies a form of political liberalism in which public reason is focused on building an overlapping consensus on the political common good between citizens through practical reasoning, but one in which there is a permissive approach to the use of metaphysical or religious arguments in the public domain. The work concludes by offering a defence of a form of political rather than legal constitutionalism; one that takes normative orientations on the nature of political freedom and the consequent role of government from neo republican theorists, whose positions are held in some respects to be complementary with those of political liberals.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Self-employment in Italy: the role of Social Security Wealth?

Using a rich micro dataset drawn from administrative archives, we explore whether Social Security Wealth (SSW) is an important factor affecting the decision to become self-employed in Italy. We focus on the two main categories of self-employed professions covered by the Italian public pension system: craftsmen and shopkeepers. We use the large exogenous variation in individual expected SSW that occurred as a result of the policy reform process undertaken in Italy during the 1990s to identify the effect of this variable and we study how the probability of being self-employed or employed depends, amongst other things, on the difference in the expected SSW that accrues under the two alternative employment scenarios. Our key finding is that a higher difference in expected SSW from self-employment compared to employment has a positive effect on the probability of being self-employed and on the probability of switching to self-employment, while it has a negative effect on the probability of switching from self-employment to employment. We also study how these effects vary with age and, in general, we find that the effect is, in absolute terms, stronger at younger and older ages

Gender Differences In Retirement Income And Pension Policy: Simulating The Effects of Various DB and DC Schemes

In this analysis, we evaluate the relative pension positions of men and women, under different characterisations of their respective working lives and pension designs. We consider both aDefined Benefit (DB) and a Defined Contribution (DC) scheme, and a few variants of their basic pension formula, each exemplifying a stylised normative framework. Not surprisingly, the working career is the most relevant factor in determining the relative retirement income of women with respect to men; pension systems can compensate, but only upto a point. As for a comparison between DB and DC systems, taken without explicit redistributive measures, the latter can fare better than the former in providing a more equal distribution of retirement income between men and women, because it removes the greater return to steeper earnings profiles, more characteristic of men. The introduction of a minimum pension provision in the DB system improves the relative position of women with discontinuousor poor careers, while, in DC systems, a formal recognition of women’s care activities through pension credits seems less effective than neutralising their longer life expectancy in the determination of the pension benefits using unisex longevity tables