In many countries elderly workers are subject to a double distortion when they consider prolonging their activity: the payroll tax and a reduction in their pension rights. It is often argued that such a double burden would not be socially desirable. We consider a setting where it would be...

It is often argued that the observed trend towards early retirement is due mainly to the implicit tax imposed on continued activity of elderly workers. We study the relevance of such a distortion in a political economy model with endogenous age of retirement. The setting is a two-period...

We follow the approach of Grochulski (2007), who determines the optimal income tax schedule when individuals have the possibility of avoiding paying taxes. We however modify his setup by considering a convex concealment cost function. This assumption violates the subadditivity property used in...

We assess the political support for parametric reforms of the Pay-As-You-Go pension system following a downward fertility shock. Using a continuous time overlapping generations model, we show that, for a large class of utility functions, the majority of the population favor a cut in pension...

We show that, when there is joint production of an agricultural good and rural amenities, the first-best allocation of resources can be implemented with a tax on the agricultural good and some subsidies on the production factors (land and labour). The use of a subsidy on the agricultural good...

Using a model of probabilistic voting, we analyse the impact of aid on the political equilibrium in the recipient country or region. We consider two kinds of politicians: the benevolent one is interested in promoting social welfare whereas the other one is clientelistic, his only goal being to...

The aim of this paper is to better understand the impact of unemployment on the design of Pay-As-You-Go pension systems, in the context of population aging. We consider a model in which people differ according to age and face in every period a given probability of becoming unemployed. We first...

We extend a simple version of the citizen candidates model (developed by Osborne-Slivinsky (1996) and Besley-Coate (1997)) to an asymmetric information setting, in which the type of a given individual is assumed to be private information. Focusing on a particular class of perfect Bayesian...

We consider a repeated electoral competition game between two parties, each representing a constituent with a given income level. Parties are unable to commit to any policy before the election; they choose a non-linear income tax schedule once elected. In each period, citizens cast a vote either...

We extend the model of Schultz (1996) to a dynamic setting with no policy commitment. Two parties that compete for election must choose the level of provision of a public good as well as the tax payment needed to finance it. The cost of producing the good may be high or low and this information...