In a recent paper, Homburg and Richter have argued that with free mobility of labor within a common labor market there is a need to harmonize and even consolidate pay-as-you-go financed national public pension systems to reach an efficient allocation of labor. We show that with free and...

The paper shows that adding social security based on a pay-as-you-go principle (PAYG) prevents countries from successfully harmonizing their individual social security systems. As claimed in the paper, the PAYG systems are extremely complicated to harmonize when the labour force is mobile among...

Aging changes the political power in a democracy in favor of the elder generations. Consequently, the retirees can extend the pay-as-you-go financed pensions. Under free labor mobility like within the EU, the success of gerontocracy, nevertheless, is restricted by migration of the young...

We present a model of crime where two municipalities exist within a metropolitan statistical area (MSA). Consistent with the literature, local law enforcement has a crime reduction effect and a crime diversion effect. The former confers a spillover benefit to the other municipality, while the...

We present a model of crime where two municipalities exist within a metro area (MSA). Consistent with the literature, local law enforcement has a crime reduction effect and a crime diversion effect. The former confers a spillover benefit to the other municipality, while the latter a spillover...

Different in more ways than it is possible to easily enumerate, the formation of the United States and the European Union (EU) had a striking similarity of purpose: to increase citizens' welfare by uniting a collection of independent states, each with its own politics, culture, and economy. Of...

A basic function of public pension systems is to guarantee a satisfactory old-age income for short-sighted low earners. In proportional (i.e., earnings-related) systems, this requires a sufficiently high contribution rate. At the same time, there should be a cap on the pension contribution base...

Not sufficiently harmonised national pension systems within the European Union distort the allocation of labour and endanger redistributive activities. This paper identifies the most decentralised level of harmonisation which guarantees efficient allocation and enables redistribution. For this,...

We study the sustainability of pension systems using a life-cycle model with distortionary taxation that sets an upper limit to the real value of tax revenues. This limit implies an endogenous threshold dependency ratio, i.e. a point in the cross-section distribution of the population beyond...

Throughout Europe today, the problems of employment and the prospects of pronounced demographic ageing combine to raise a number of questions on the future of pensions and on the underlying principles of redistribution between generations. Everywhere a new debate has arisen on intergenerational...