This paper develops a public education scheme that takes uncertainty aspects of private educational investments explicitly into account. In the author’s framework, the social merits of public education schemes are related to the lack of markets in which students can insure against educational...

The use of asymptotic critical values in stationarity tests against the alternative of a unit rot process is known to lead to overrejections in finite samples when the considered process is stationary but highly persistent. We claim that in recent parametric tests this is caused by estimation...

Healthcare expenditure has increased substantially in all western industrialized countries in the last decades. The necessity to contain the increase in health care expenditure has motivated the Analysis of its determinants to explain differences across countries and health systems. However,...

This paper examines the extent to which conclusions of cross-country studies of private savings are robust to allowing for the possible heterogeneity of savings behavior across countries and the inclusion of dynamics. It shows that neglecting heterogeneity and dynamics can lead to misleading...

The behavior of the dollar/euro exchange rate is modeled using a monetary model of the exchange rate. The econometric analysis is complicated by the short sample span of actual euro data available for analysis. Hence, data on a "synthetic" euro are used. The assumptions underlying the monetary...

Dismissal rules, i.e. legally enforced long term contracts, have beem defended against criticism for, among other things, providing efficient incentives to invest in relationship specific skills. However, in many situations efficient investment can also be attained by spot contracts. We...

In this paper, we abandon the stylized median voter and study (i) how distributional tensions can act in many different ways depending on social affinity and on the prospect of upward or downwardmobility of the different income classes, (ii) income distribution dynamics, intergenerational...

Experience shows that there is often ample room for more effective and efficient use of investment tax incentives in low-income countries. Tax incentives generally rank low in investment climate surveys in low-income countries, and there are many examples in which they are reported to be...

This reference guide provides a good grounding in what tax administration reform is, why it is important, what is involved in implementing it, and who should be involved in the reform process. The materials covered in this reference guide are designed to cover the key practices that have been...

Concerns about restructuring old-age income provisions and reforming public pension schemes are an OECD-wide phenomenon. This paper highlights first the background of the reform debate. Despite the divergences in the structure of public pension schemes, the main pressures for reform are...