The Canada Dry pensions system is in some countries one of the frequent routes to early retirement. It constitutes an informal substitute for early retirement programs. Accordingly, firms lay off aged workers they find costly for what they produce and, to get their support, supplement...

The purpose of this paper is to survey the theoretical literature on wealth transfer taxation. The focus is normative: we are looking at the design of an optimal tax structure from the standpoint of both equity and efficiency. The gist of this survey is that the optimal design crucially depends...

This chapter reviews recent theoretical work on the effect of factor mobility and the ensuing tax competition on the capacity of governments to raise revenue and redistribute income. It focuses on three issues: the relevance and limitations of the race to the bottom result, the benefits and...

This paper studies the determination through majority voting of a pension scheme when society consists of far-sighted and myopic individuals. All individuals have the same basic preferences but myopics tend to adopt a short term view (instant gratification) when dealing with retirement saving....

We study the design of pension benefits for male and female workers. Women live longer than men but have a lower wage. Individuals can be single or live in couples who pool their incomes. Social welfare is utilitarian but an increasing concave transformation of individuals' lifetime utilities...

This paper studies the role of social insurance as a redistributive mechanism in the presence of an optimal (linear or general) income tax. It considers a second-best setting with two unobservable individual characteristics: ability, measured by the wage rate, and risk, measured by the...

This paper studies the design of a pay-as-you-go social security system in a society where fertility is in part stochastic and in part determined through capital investment. If parents' investments in children are publicly observable, pension benefits must be linked positively to the level of...