Understanding the role and functions of social policy and social security systems is a key point for a discussion on reforms of the retirement systems. In this essay I describe the subject and range of social policy in the modern welfare state. The work has a descriptive character and aims at...

This paper gives an overview of some issues related to market aluation, focusing on the developments on the New York equity markets. The 42.4 p.c. fall in the S&P 500 price index between 24 March 2000 - when it reached its all-time high - and 31 December 2002 is situated in a very long term...

This paper looks at the impact on Australia’s trade in crops (non-wheat grains and oilseeds) where GM technology has been introduced. The model includes assumptions about the productivity gains of GM crops, possible consumer responses and regulatory costs for Australia and its major trading...

In this paper we consider an overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility and two-sided altruism and show the limitations of applying commonly used open loop Nash equilibrium in characterizing equilibrium transfers from parents to children in the form of bequest, and transfers from...

We study the aggregate effects of a social security reform in a large overlapping generations model where markets are incomplete and households face uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. We depart from the previous literature by assuming that, because of lack of commitment in the credit...

We simulate the budget of the main pension institution of the country, the Banco de Previsión Social (BPS), from 1995, the year the reform was passed, to 2050, when the new system should be mature. We perform several sensitivity analyses to evaluate which are the key exogenous variables and...

Edward P. Lazear‘s thesis that “personal accounts are more consistent with economic principles, avoid government moral hazard, and provide more security than government Social Security” is unsound. The same applies to a number of other statements that are made in the process of expounding...

I analyze simultaneous voting on the wage tax rate and investment in public education using a model with three overlapping generations and ability differences inside each cohort. Wage tax revenue finances public education and social security benefits. I derive the results both for a...

Paper presents a survey of five different approaches to retirement decision analysis. Simple life cycle labour supply model leads to a classical optimization problem of choice between work and leisure, but it is highly limited in explaining retirement decision as a static approach. Comparative...