We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labour market risk. The mix of quantity and price protective measures adopted by the various countries would seem to correspond to a stable...

We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labor market risk. Different countries' locations along this trade-off represent stable, hard to modify, politico-economic equilibria. We...

Early retirement represents a policy response to the appearance of a mass of redundant middle- aged workers, who were not entitled to a pension transfer in their old age. This policy is distortionary, since it reduces the incentive to accumulate human capital, and thus decreases economic growth....

This paper argues that social security enjoys wider political support than other welfare programs because: (i) retirees constitute the most homogeneous voting group,\ and (ii) the intragenerational redistribution component of social security induces low-income young to support this system. In a...

Generous early retirement provisions account for a large proportion of the drop in the labor force participation of elderly workers. The aim of this paper is to provide a positive theory of early retirement. We suggest that the political support for generous early retirement provisions relies...

We provide a long term perspective on the individual retirement behavior and on the future of early retirement. In a cross-country sample, we find that total pension spending depends positively on the degree of early retirement and on the share of elderly in the population, which increase the...

The aim of this paper is to compute, using an accounting exercise, the effect of immigrants over the three factors, which determine the income per capita (demographic factor, employment rate and productivity). We saw that immigration has had a positive effect over the two first, but negative...

Bismarckian social security systems are associated with larger public pension expenditures, a smaller fraction of private pension and lower income inequality than Beveridgean systems. This paper introduces a bidimensional voting model to account for all these features. Agents differ in age,...

We analyse risk sharing and endogenous fiscal spending in a two-region model with sequentially complete markets. Fiscal policy is determined by majority voting. When policy setting is decentralized, regions choose pro-cyclical fiscal spending in an attempt to manipulate security prices to their...

We try to build a quantitative-theoretical framework to understand the impact of immigration on the Spanish pension system, both during the last ten years and, more importantly, during the future fifty years. In other words, we look at the recent past in a tentative to predict the future....