Volunteering plays a prominent role in the charitable provision of goods and services, yet we know relatively little about why people engage in such prosocial acts. The list of possible motivations is long, but recent research has focused on altruism, reputational concerns, and material...

Empirical analyses of the effects of public and private pensions on household saving impose strong assumptions in order to obtain a tractable empirical model: fixed retirement and pension claiming ages, no borrowing constraint, little or no uncertainty, and no institutional restrictions on...

This paper provides a simple matching model in which unemployed workers and employers in large firms can be matched together through social networks or through more "formal" methods of search. We show that networks do not necessarily add new externalities and that some results previously...

The unemployment rise in EU countries has been particularly strong for low-skilled workers. This observation has often been explained in terms of biased technical change and relative wage rigidities. More attention has been paid recently to an alternative mechanism, the crowding-out of...

In 1990 Colombia replaced its traditional system of severance payments with a new system of severance payments savings accounts (SPSAs). Although severance payments often are justified on the grounds that they provide insurance against earnings loss, they also increase costs for employers and...

This paper investigates one of the most important financial issues arising from a secession or a country partitioning namely the sharing of the national public debt. Extending Dr?ze's distributive neutrality condition, we use the generational accounting technique and propose a dynamic...

A model linking macroeconomic phenomena and income distribution in balanced growth equilibria is developed as a variant to the Kaldor model of factor shares. It departs from the original Kaldor model in assuming equal savings rates and production determined by a matching process between workers...

Is there a role for debt beyond curing overaccumulation of capital? Does dynamic efficiency and the infeasibility of debt Ponzi schemes eliminate any Pareto-improving role for a government in a competitive economy with complete markets? Is there an optimal maturity structure of public debt?...

Private school students do not always perform better in standardized tests. We suggest that this may be explained by choice of private schooling by less capable students in countries where government schools are better suited to talented students. To assess the empirical relevance of this...