Patterns of female employment participation are compared in a variety of European countries with differing levels of child care provision. The earnings forgone over a lifetime by a woman bearing children (compared with the earnings of her childless counterpart) are simulated for four countries,...

We investigate how the assumption that individuals are characterized by some recent forms of behavioural preferences changes the analysis of an otherwise classical welfare problem, namely the optimal allocation of a scarce resource among a finite number of claimants. We consider two preference...

Destination countries are progressively shifting towards selective immigration policies. These can eectively increase migrants' average education even if one allows for endogenous schooling decisions and education policies at origin. Still, more selective immigration policies reduce social...

We analyse different forms of international debt mutualisation in a simple framework with a political distortion and (partial) default under adverse economic circumstances. One form is a debt repayment guarantee, which can be "unlimited" or "limited", i.e. only be invoked when the guarantee...

This paper compares constraints on the public debt with constraints on the primary deficit. The analysis takes into account how an optimizing government reacts to the different constraints when deciding on a spending and borrowing plan. We find that the economy behaves similarly under both...

In a competitive two-country overlapping generations model with perfect capital mobility, a plan that is individually Pareto optimal (that is Pareto optimal with respect to individual preferences) can be sustained without coordination of national fiscal policies where the fiscal arsenal is...

The literature on new goods and social welfare generally assumes that manufacturers develop innovations. But innovation by users has been found to also be an important part of innovative activity in the economy. In this Paper we explore the impact of users as a source of innovation on product...