Children who can count on support from altruistic parents may not try hard to succeed in the labor market. Moreover, parental altruism makes withdrawal of such support non-credible. To promote work effort, parents may want to instill norms which later cause their children to experience guilt or...

Young generations demand substantially more social insurance than older generations, although program rules have been constant for decades. I postulate a model where the utility of taking up social insurance benefits depends on the past behavior of older generations. The model is estimated with...

Poor health, large acute and long-term care medical expenses, and spousal death are significant drivers of impoverishment among retirees. We document these facts and build a rich, overlapping generations model that reproduces them. We use the model to assess the incentive and welfare effects of...

We analyze the determinants of the demand for social, private and self-insurance for long-term care in an environment where agents differ in income, probability of becoming dependent and of receiving family help. Uniform social benefits are financed with a proportional income tax and are thus...

Children who can count on support from altruistic parents may not try hard to succeed in the labor market. Moreover, parental altruism makes withdrawal of such support non-credible. To promote work effort, parents may want to instill norms which later cause their children to experience guilt or...

Based on local variations in vocational rehabilitation (VR) priorities, we examine the impacts of alternative VR programs on short- and long-term labor market outcomes for temporary disability insurance (TDI) claimants in Norway. The analysis builds on rich and detailed administrative registers...

We evaluate a comprehensive activation program in Norway targeted at hard-to-employ social assistance claimants with reduced work capacity. The program offers a combination of tailored rehabilitation, training and job practice, and a generous, stable, and non-means-tested benefit. Its main aims...

Revisiting Parsons' 1996 article about disability insurance with imperfect tagging in a two type-economy -- individuals are either able or disabled. Here Parsons' analysis is extended in several directions. The model is generalized to allow for different utility functions over work status. The...

Using Varian´s social insurance framework with a piecewise linear two bracket income tax, where t_1 is the tax rate in the lower bracket and t_1+t_2 is the tax rate in the upper bracket, Strawcynski (1998) claims that optimal requires t_1^*t_2^*=1. This note provides three comments: First, it...

Premium subsidies have been advocated as an alternative to social health insurance. These subsidies are paid if expenditure on health insurance exceeds a given share of income. In this paper, we examine whether this approach is superior to social insurance from a welfare perspective. We show...