This paper analyzes simultaneous voting on the wage tax rate and investment in public education with three overlapping generations and productivity differences inside each cohort. Wage tax revenue finances public education and social security benefits. The presence of productivity differences...

Migration between countries with earnings-related and flat-rate pay-as-you-go social security systems may change human capital investments in both countries. The possibility of emigration boosts investments in human capital in the country with flat-rate benefits. Correspondingly, those expecting...

We study the welfare effects of earnings testing flat-rate old-age benefits in a quantitative overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic labor income risk. In our model economy, even a moderate earnings testing reduces individuals’ expected lifetime utility, whenever other taxes are...

Migration between countries with earnings-related and flat-rate pay-as-you-go social security systems may change human capital investments in both countries. The possibility of emigration boosts investments in human capital in the country with flat-rate benefits. Correspondingly, those expecting...

This paper analyzes simultaneous voting on the wage tax rate and investment in public education with three overlapping generations and productivity differences inside each cohort. Wage tax revenue finances public education and social security benefits. The presence of productivity differences...

We suggest a political economy explanation for the stylized fact that intragenerationally more redistributive social security systems are smaller. We relate the stylized fact to an efficiency-redistribution trade-off to be resolved by political process. The inefficiency of social security...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the implications of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) accession of eight Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) on their share in EMU-12 imports. Overcoming biases related to endogeneity, omitted variables and sample selection, our results...

This paper deals with potential instabilities in the Eurozone stemming from an insufficient interplay between monetary policy and reform effort on the one hand and the emergence of intra-Euro area divergences on the other. As a first step, we assess the effect of EMU on structural reform and...

This paper empirically investigates the differences in the motives of raising privatisation proceeds for a panel of EU countries from 1990 to 2000. More specifically, we test whether privatisations can be mainly interpreted (a) as ingredients of a larger reform package of economic liberalisation...