This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

The paper examines the implications of an important aspect of the ongoing reorganization of work – the move from occupational specialization towards multi-tasking – for centralized wage bargaining. The analysis shows how, on account of this reorganization, centralized bargaining becomes...

This paper explores the implications of giving unemployed people -- particularly the long-term unemployed -- the opportunity to use part of their unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. The vouchers would depend positively on unemployment duration and...

In this Paper, we analyse the extent to which market forces create an incentive for cloning human beings. We show that a market for cloning arises if a large enough fraction of the clone's income can be appropriated by its model. Only people with the highest ability are cloned, while people at...

This paper studies a model of human capital accumulation with real wage rigidity. It is shown that the arbitrage condition between hiring a skilled versus an unskilled worker may be stated as a positive relationship between their relative unemployment rates. It may be the case that this locus is...

This paper studies the impact of income inequality on fiscal conservatism when an increase in inequality affects the bottom portion of income distribution. It is argued that, contrary to what is generally assumed in the economic literature, inequality will then be associated with less, rather...

The paper examines the employment and unemployment implications of permitting unemployed people to use part of their unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. This opportunity to transfer unemployment benefits, `benefit transfers', would help replace the...

We study the evolution of an educational system which is founded on a hierarchical differentiation between technical and general education, with a superior social status attached to general. The resulting dynamic political equilibrium is best summarized by the ratio of vocational to general...

How many "American jobs" have U.S.-born workers lost due to immigration and offshoring? Or, alternatively, is it possible that immigration and offshoring, by promoting cost-savings and enhanced efficiency in firms, have spurred the creation of jobs for U.S. natives? We consider a multi-sector...

We study the incentives to improve ability in a model where heterogeneous firms and workers interact in a labor market characterized by matching frictions and costly screening. When effort in improving ability raises both the mean and the variance of the resulting ability distribution, multiple...