This paper investigates the informal labour market in Russia in late 1995 and estimates a labour supply function in the informal sector using nationally representative micro-data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, Round VI. The findings show that the informal economy constitutes a...

This paper suggests that human capital externalities are important in determining whether goods and services should be privately or publicly provided. We study situations where that the cost incurred by an individual provider for providing quality is affected by the human capital of her...

This paper analyzes whether the two tasks of building infrastructures which are socially useful and managing those assets should be bundled or not. When performances contracts can be written, both tasks should be performed altogether by the same firm when a better design of the infrastructure...

Social insurance for the elderly is judged responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or in a first-best setting, there would be no such trend. However, when first-best instruments are not available, because health and productivity are not...

During the period from 1880 to 1950 publicly managed retirement security programs became an important part of the social fabric in most advanced economies. In this paper we study the social, demographic and economic origins of social security. We describe a model economy in which demographics,...

Social Security programmes around the world link public pensions to retirement: people do not lose their pensions if they make a million dollars a year in the stock market, but they do confront marginal tax rates of up to 100% if they choose to work. After arguing that most existing theories...

This Paper considers the optimal design of public pension provision for the retired and income support for those of working age. We consider social security systems that differ in terms of the level of benefits, degree of means testing and the nature of contributions. We aim to find which system...

The paper surveys and extends recent results on the effect of changes in government fiscal and financial policy, and in private savings behaviour, on economic growth. Private saving behaviour is represented by an overlapping generations (OLG) model. The supply side of the model permits...

This paper uses comparative statistics in a simple three-period overlapping generations model to show that any pay-as-you-go mechanism for public retirement pensions, when adopted in a dualistic economic system, penalises the most dynamic demographic groups, i.e., the <MI>developing<D> rather than the...</d></mi>

We analyze the effect of the projected demographic transition on the political support for social security, and equilibrium outcomes. Embedding a probabilistic-voting setup of electoral competition in the Diamond (1965) OLG model, we find that intergenerational transfers arise in the absence of...