Financial Satisfaction and (in)formal Sector in a Transition Country

This paper examines the relationship between working in the formal or informal sector and self-reported individual financial satisfaction in a country in transition. It does so by allowing for individual heterogeneity in terms of perceived financial insecurity and tax morale. The empirical analysis uses a dataset for Albania, a country in transition. The method applied is the ‘self-administered questionnaire’, which combines personal contacts with written questionnaire. The results indicate that, for most individuals, working in the informal sector has negative effects on their self reported financial satisfaction. For some individuals, however, this effect is positive. The characteristic defining these two groups of individuals is their attitude towards the perceived financial insecurity related to not paying taxes. These findings have important implications, in particular for transition countries with large informal sectors. Given the involuntary participation in the informal sector in these countries, the majority of individuals working in this sector will remain financially dissatisfied as long as they have no other social safety net

Multidimensional screening in a monopolistic insurance market

Support from the Government of Catalonia project 2005SGR00836 and the Barcelona GSE Research Network, as well as from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, project ECO2009-07616 and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010(CSD2006-0016)We consider a population of individuals who differ in two dimensions, their risk type (expected loss) and their risk aversion, and solve for the profit-maximising menu of contracts that a monopolistic insurer puts out on the market. Our findings are threefold. First, it is never optimal to fully separate all the types. Second, if heterogeneity in risk aversion is sufficiently high, then some high-risk individuals (the risk-tolerant ones) will obtain lower coverage than some low-risk individuals (the risk-averse ones). Third, because women tend to be more risk averse than men (in that the risk aversion distribution for women first-order stochastically dominates that for men), gender discrimination may lead to a Pareto improvement

Ageism in Belgium and Burundi: a comparative analysis

Manon Marquet, Pierre Missotten, Sarah Schroyen, Desiderate Nindaba, Stéphane Adam Psychology of Aging Unit, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium Background: Recent cross-cultural comparisons between Asian and Western cultures have shown that ageism arises more from the lack of availability of social and economic resources for older adults than from the culture itself. We tested this assumption by conducting a survey among people living in a least developed country compared with those living in a developed country.Participants and methods: Twenty-seven Belgians living in Belgium, 29 Burundians living in Belgium, and 32 Burundians living in Burundi were included in this study. Their attitudes toward older adults were assessed using several self-reported measures.Results: Statistical analyses confirmed that older people are more negatively perceived by Burundians living in Burundi than by Burundians and Belgians living in Belgium, whose attitudes did not differ from each other.Conclusion: Consistent with our hypothesis, our results suggest that the level of development of a country and more particularly the lack of government spending on older people (pension and health care systems) may contribute to their younger counterparts perceiving them more negatively. Keywords: attitudes toward older adults, cross-cultural differences, socioeconomic development, intergenerational relation

Operational expressions for the marginal cost of indirect taxation when merit arguments matter

Merit goods, Marginal indirect tax reform, D12, H21,