The problems of crime and the quality of justice have become central issues in public debate and important public policy concerns in a number of Caribbean countries. This problem is perhaps most acute in Jamaica which has acquired an unenviable reputation for having a high rate of violent crime....

This paper shows that, depending on the initial distribution of material wealth and that of individuals' abilities, economies converge in the long-run towards different levels of the size of the skilled workforce, and average wealth. Furthermore, unless the income tax rate is too high, the...

This paper studies how to design a fiscal constitution that protects future generations from expropriation and generates optimal investment in intergenerational public goods. We study how to accomplish these goals by changing the level of government to which different types of intergenerational...

This article introduces the role of labor demand of the elderly in the analysis of retirement decisions. We integrate both human capital formation and up-dating costs on older workers' job and explore how Social Security system affects human capital investment and retirement decisions. We show...

Social security tends to be unsustainable in nature. It reduces individuals'' demand for children as a measure to support their lifestyle during old age, which in turn undermines the financial basis of social security. Using a simple overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility and...

We show in this paper that GDP per-capita growth is more likely affected by the accumulation of education at the higher schooling levels in both OECD and DCs. However, in terms of the public funds allocation, this result does not prevent public education expenditures to be reallocated from...

This paper analyzes the effects of child allowance on households without a child with respect to the pay-as-you-go public pension system. We demonstrate that the child allowance can improve the utilities of households without a child through an increased pension benefits when the rate of...

This note is about the possibility of a stalemate in a continuing conflict. Following the prevailing economic literature on the topic, under some assumptions, the outcome of a conflict can be described in two ways: (i) a predetermined split of the contested output (ii) a winner-take-all contest...

This paper focuses on how education costs affect the political determination of redistribution policy via individual decision making on education. For cases of high costs, there are multiple equilibria: the poor-majority equilibrium featured by the minority of highly educated individuals and a...

Starting from the median voter model commonly used in the literature to analyse the determinants of the functional distribution of public spending, we propose a new multiproduct dynamic model that also allows one to classify the nature of the interaction –complementarity or...