On the Role of Pension Systems in Economic Development and Demographic Transition

In this paper we examine whether di¤erent pension systems a¤ect the set of initial human capital conditions capturing an economy in a low steady state equilibrium income. To analyze this problem, we employ a three period over- lapping generations model where fertility and investments into the children?s education are chosen endogenously. We show that education investments are higher and start at lower income levels for a pay-as-you-go pension system econ- omy compared to an informal, fertility related one. The income threshold needed to escape the ?poverty trap? is therefore lower if a pay-as-you-go pension sys- tem is employed. Moreover, unless the economy is caught in the low income steady state, a pay-as-you-go pension system supports higher equilibrium in- come. We further highlight that pension systems in?uence the timing of de- mographic transition through their di¤erent valuation of fertility, contributing to the explanation for observed di¤erences between developed and developing countries.

What determines fiscal policy? Evidence from German states

This paper explores the factors behind the time path of real spending and revenue in the West German states from 1975 to 2004. The empirical approach stresses robustness and takes into account a large set of economic and political variables. Our results suggest that common economic factors and, to a smaller degree, state-specific economic developments are important determinants of state fiscal performance. In comparison, the influence of political factors is limited both in statistical and quantitative terms. Finally, there is evidence that addressing governance problems and ensuring flexibility in terms of fiscal strategy are important ingredients for any policy aimed at improving fiscal outcomes at the state level. --German Länder,fiscal policy,public spending,public debt,extreme bounds analysis,governance.

Pension Systems and their Influence on Fertility and Growth

This paper studies the implications of di¤erent public pension systems on fertility and economic growth. Employing a three period overlapping gener- ations endogenous growth model we compare the di¤erent impacts of pay-as- you-go-, fully funded- and informal pension systems. The novelty of our work lies in the formulation of altruism that is assumed to be one sided (descending) for economies represented by a public pension system and two sided (descend- ing and ascending) for economies with informal pension systems. Through the incorporation of a mixed procreation motive we can study the case of fully crowded out intrafamilial transfers inside a public pension system model while still capturing fertility endogenously. We show that the introduction of public pension systems to a developing economy reduce fertility and stimulate economic growth. Through a comparison of the di¤erent public pension systems we highlight that a fully funded pension system results in higher economic growth compared to a pay-as-you-go one despite higher fertility because the growth enhancing e¤ect of the higher capital stock is dominant. This suggests that observed fertility and growth di¤erences between the US and Europe can partly be explained by the di¤erent types of pension systems.

Electrophysiological and kinematic correlates of communicative intent in the planning and production of pointing gestures and speech

Acknowledgements We thank Albert Russel for assistance in setting up the experiments, and Charlotte Paulisse for help in data collection.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

How visual cues to speech rate influence speech perception

Spoken words are highly variable and therefore listeners interpret speech sounds relative to the surrounding acoustic context, such as the speech rate of a preceding sentence. For instance, a vowel midway between short /ɑ/ and long /a:/ in Dutch is perceived as short /ɑ/ in the context of preceding slow speech, but as long /a:/ if preceded by a fast context. Despite the well-established influence of visual articulatory cues on speech comprehension, it remains unclear whether visual cues to speech rate also influence subsequent spoken word recognition. In two ‘Go Fish’-like experiments, participants were presented with audio-only (auditory speech + fixation cross), visual-only (mute videos of talking head), and audiovisual (speech + videos) context sentences, followed by ambiguous target words containing vowels midway between short /ɑ/ and long /a:/. In Experiment 1, target words were always presented auditorily, without visual articulatory cues. Although the audio-only and audiovisual contexts induced a rate effect (i.e., more long /a:/ responses after fast contexts), the visual-only condition did not. When, in Experiment 2, target words were presented audiovisually, rate effects were observed in all three conditions, including visual-only. This suggests that visual cues to speech rate in a context sentence influence the perception of following visual target cues (e.g., duration of lip aperture), which at an audiovisual integration stage bias participants’ target categorization responses. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how what we see influences what we hear

Exploiting the time of arrival of Cherenkov photons at the 28 m H.E.S.S. telescope for background rejection: Methods and performance

In 2012, the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) was expanded by a fifth telescope (CT5). With an effective mirror diameter of 28m, CT5 is able to detect the Cherenkov light of very faint gamma-ray air showers, thereby significantly lowering the energy threshold of this telescope compared to the other four telescopes. Extracting as much information as possible from the recorded shower image is crucial for background rejection and to reach an energy threshold of a few tens of GeV. The camera of CT5 is conceived to register the time of the charge pulse maximum with respect to the beginning of the 16 ns integration window of each pixel. This information can be utilised to improve the event reconstruction. It also helps to reduce the background contamination at low energies. We present new techniques for background rejection based on CT5 timing information and evaluate their performance