Unequal wages for equal utilities

When educational policy is supplemented by a redistributive income tax, and when individualsdiffer in their ability to benefit from education, the optimal policy is typically rather regressive.Resources are concentrated on the most able individuals in order to get a "cake" as big aspossible to share among individuals through income taxation. In this paper we put forwardanother reason to push for regressive education. It is not linked to heterogeneity in innate ability to benefit from education but to pervasive non-convexities that arise in the optimal income tax problem when individual productivities are endogenous. For simplicity we assume a lineareducation technology and a given total education budget. To give the equal wage outcome thebest chance to emerge, we also assume that individuals have identical learning abilities.Nevertheless, it turns out that in the first-best wage inequality is always preferable to wageequality. Even more surprisingly, this conclusion remains valid in the second-best (unless adhoc restriction on the feasible degree of a wage differentiation are imposed). This is in spite ofthe fact that wage equalization would eliminate any need for distortionary income taxation.education policy, optimal income taxation, equal opportunity

Collective annuities and redistribution

In a number of countries one observes a steady decline in defined benefits pensions schemes,public or private, funded or unfunded, and a simultaneous expansion of defined contributionsplans. One of the consequences of this trend is to deprive individuals at the time of theirretirement from the benefit of collective annuitization. Collective annuities can be distinguished from individual ones in two ways. First, they tend to be cheaper because of their scale and because of inefficiencies in private annuity markets. Second they redistribute resources from short-lived to long-lived individuals. Our paper studies the role of collective annuities. Both their redistributive incidence and efficiency aspects are accounted for. We assume that lifetime is uncertain and that there is a positive correlation between longevity and earnings. Collective annuitization (in part or in total) can be imposed on private savings or it can be "bundled" with a redistributive pension scheme. We show that the case for applying collective annuitization to private savings is weak. The case is stronger when collective annuities are associated with redistributive pensions. However, even in that case, collective annuitization may mitigate the redistributive benefits associated with the pension system.annuities, public pensions, differential longevity

Zaposlovanje in mladi v sodobnem svetu

Long-term care (LTC) needs are expected to rapidly increase in the next decades and at the same time the main provider of LTC, namely the family is stalling. This calls for more involvement of the state that today covers less than 20% of these needs and most often in an inconsistent way. Besides the need to help the poor dependent, there is a mounting concern in the middle class that a number of dependent people are incurring costs that could force them to sell all their assets. In this paper we study the design of a social insurance that meets this concern. Following Arrow (1963), we suggest a policy that is characterized by complete insurance above a deductible amount. Keywords: capped spending, Arrowís theorem, long-term care insurance, optimal taxation JEL codes: H21, I13, J1

Public and private environmental spending : a political economy approach

This paper studies the determination of public investment in environmental quality when there are private alternatives. Public investment is chosen by majority voting. When consumption and environmental quality are complementary one may observe a solution of the type "ends against the middle".

How powerful is demography? The Serendipity Theorem revisited

Introduced by Samuelson (1975), the Serendipity Theorem states that the competitive economy will converge towards the optimum steady-state provided the optimum population growth rate is imposed. This paper aims at exploring whether the Serendipity Theorem still holds in an economy with risky lifetime. We show that, under general conditions, including a perfect annuity market with actuarially fair return, imposing the optimum fertility rate and the optimum survival rate leads the competitive economy to the optimum steady-state. That Extended Serendipity Theorem is also shown to hold in economies where old adults work some fraction of the old-age, whatever the retirement age is fixed or chosen by the agents

Herpesvirus type 2 infection and carcinoma of the cervix

SCOPUS: le.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe