The European Union consists of a wide variety of welfare states with social insurance schemes ranging from those providing earnings related benefits (Bismarckian)to flat rate benefits (Beveridgean)systems. The conventional wisdom is that with factor mobility poor people have incentives to move...

This paper studies the role of family size in the design of optimal income taxation. We consider a second best setting where the government observes the number of children and the income of the parents but not their productivity.

We consider a two-period overlapping generations model in which individual voters differ not only according to age but also productivity. In such a setting, a (redistributive) Pay-As-You-Go system is politically sustainable, even when the interest rate is larger than the rate of population growth .

This paper extends the Atkinson-Stiglitz model of direct and indirect taxation to a dynamic setting with two unobservable characteristics: productive ability and inherited wealth.Bequests are motivated by the "joy of giving".

We consider social insurance schemes with a two-part benefit formula: a flat (constant) term and a variable term which is proportional to individuals' contributions. The factor of proportionality defines the type of social insurance. We adopt a two-stage political economy approach. At the first,...