This paper studies the role of internal migration in income convergence across regions in Japan. Neoclassical theory predicts that migration should have been an important source of convergence, but regression results suggest otherwise. The paper investigates the possibility that this discrepancy...

The Paper studies determinants of internal migration in Russia. Using panel data on gross region-to-region migration flows in 1992-99, we estimate the effect of economic, political and social factors. Although overall migration is rather low, it turns out that its intensity does depend on...

We study barriers to labor mobility using panel data on gross region-to-region migration flows in Russia for 1995-2010. We find that barriers that hindered internal migration in 1990s have been generally eliminated by the end of 2000s. In 1990s many poor Russian regions were in poverty traps:...

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>