This paper examines whether myopia (misperception of the long-term care (LTC) risk) and private insurance market loading costs can justify social LTC insurance and/or the subsidization of private insurance. We use a two-period model wherein individuals differ in three unobservable...

We consider an unhealthy good, such as a sugar-sweetened beverage, the health damages of which are misperceived by consumers. The sugar content is endogenous. We first study the solution under “pseudo” perfect competition. In that case a simple Pigouvian tax levied per unit of output but...

In the context of international tax coordination incomplete information is one of the well-known frictions that can lead to bargaining failure and might explain a lack of observed coordination. We consider international negotiations about tax coordination under complete and incomplete...

The paper analyzes the wage-employment effects of replacing unemployment benefits by negative income taxes. It first surveys the major equity and efficiency effects of unemployment benefits versus negative income taxes, and summarizes the salient features of many European unemployment benefit...

The paper surveys unemployment policies for advanced market economies and evaluates them by examining the predictions of the underlying macroeconomic theories. The basic idea is that, for the most part, different unemployment policy prescriptions rest on different macroeconomic theories, and our...

The paper examines the employment and unemployment implications of permitting unemployed people to use part of their unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. This opportunity to transfer unemployment benefits into employment subsidies--quot;benefit...

The paper explains how a country can fall into a quot;low-skill, bad-job trap,quot; in which workers acquire insufficient training and firms provide insufficient skilled vacancies. In particular, the paper argues that in countries where a large proportion of the workforce is unskilled, firms...

We study the design of pension benefits for male and female workers. Women live longer than men but have a lower wage. Individuals can be single or live in couples who pool their incomes. Social welfare is utilitarian but an increasing concave transformation of individuals’ lifetime utilities...

We study the design of social long-term care (LTC) insurance when informal care is exchange-based. Parents do not observe their children's cost of providing care, which is continuously distributed over some interval. They choose a rule specifying transfers that are conditional on the level of...

If countries anticipate Bertrand competition in tax rates, they may expend effort that makes some of their tax payers less mobile or increases the mobility of tax payers elsewhere. I provide piecemeal evidence on what activities countries use. I analyse how such activities interact with Bertrand...