The purpose of this paper is to provide for both life and non-life insurance an assessment of the relative productive performance of French companies. We use parametric and nonparametric approaches to construct a frontier to be used as a yardstick of productive efficiency. Our data basis covers...

This paper studies the incidence of tax-transfer policy in a growth model wherein individuals differ according to their level of intergenerational altruism and have an endogenous labor supply. The main results is that public debt is neutral at the macro level but redistributes resources from...

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,...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical evaluation of theoretical modelshowing that shifting from pay-as-you-go to funded social security schemes can be made Pareto-improving. Further, it argues that what often makes a reform toward funded schemes attractive is a number of additional...

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...