The paper studies the role of international implications after EU enlargement. Based on a formal model with migration costs for both capital and labor, it predicts a two-sided migration from the new to the old EU countries which is later reversed. As the migration pattern chosen by market forces...

The welfare state can be seen as an insurance device that makes lifetime careers safer, increases risk taking and suffers from moral hazard effects. Adopting this view, the paper studies the trade-off between average income and inequality, evaluating redistributive equilibria from an allocative...

This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

Group 1 holds political power. Group 2 threatens this power. Group 1 decreases the upheaval probability by co-opting some agents from Group 2 into a more benign Group 3. Improvements in upheaval technology lead to less co-optation. Increasing the relative size of Group 1 implies larger...

Before the early 1970s generous welfare states seemed to be consistent with high employment. Since then, there has been growing concern over disincentive effects of social insurance. This paper suggests that the problem may have arisen in part because European nations were in effect trying to...

This paper argues that increased factor mobility incurs the risk of dismantling the welfare state, even though this state may have useful allocative functions. It will be difficult to finance the welfare state with taxes on capital and it may be necessary to subsidize this factor in the sense...

The paper examines the appropriate domain of the Welfare State by exploring the areas in which free enterprise fails to provide adequate welfare state services. The paper outlines a simple coherent strategy for formulating government welfare state policy by identifying the relevant market...

Recent research in the United States and New Zealand has suggested that over the last two decades the age profile of well-being has shifted against children and in favor of the elderly population. This shift has occurred because welfare systems have become increasingly generous towards older...

We examine the growth performance of Sweden in the post-World War II period, focusing on explaining the relative decline of economic growth in Sweden since the early 1970's. The hypothesis that the relative decline is a consequence of productivity catch-up is rejected. A number of potential...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of an inflow of low-skilled workers into an economy where there is capital accumulation, endogenous labour supply and heterogeneous workers. We find substantial dynamic effects, with adjustments that resemble those triggered by a sudden disruption of...