This paper discusses five examples of the conventional wisdom that has often been expressed in the social security debate, even among academic economists. These are: 1. The major problem in most social security systems is that of demography: people simply live too long. 2. Disregarding the issue...

This paper analyzes the effects of progressive taxes on labour supply and income distribution in the context of the rank-order tournament model originally developed by Lazear and Rosen (1981). We show conditions under which a more progressive tax schedule will cause so large general equilibrium...

An intertemporal general equilibrium model of criminal behavior is used to analyze the effect on crime of changing policy parameters. The policy parameters are the length of the prison term, the severity of punishment, and the amount of police resources. The number of crimes in society can be...

In order to get a more complete picture of how labor supply is affected by economic incentives, the effects on absenteeism and not just on contracted hours should be taken into account. In particular, absenteeism due to sick leave can be considerable. In this paper we examine whether the level...

We study the effects of experimental design on male and female behavior in a dictator game. Following social identity theory we investigate how experimental procedure may affect outcome through gender priming, i.e. the activation of gender stereotypes specifying that women behave altruistically...

While there is ample evidence of a society-wide cooperation norm, it is not as clear who upholds this norm. In the present paper, we investigate whether there are gender differences with respect to norm enforcement. We let 1403 subjects play games of punishment and reward, individually or in...

In this paper we treat an individual’s health as a continuous variable, in contrast to the traditional literature on income insurance, where it is regularly treated as a binary variable. This is not a minor technical matter; in fact, a continuous treatment of an individual’s health sheds new...

In this paper we treat an individual’s health as a continuous variable, in contrast to the traditional literature on income insurance, where it is regularly treated as a binary variable. This is not a minor technical matter; in fact, a continuous treatment of an individual’s health sheds new...

In many countries, sickness absence financed by generous insurance benefits is an important concern in the policy debate. There are strong variations in absence behavior among local geographical areas. Such variations are difficult to explain in terms of observable socioeconomic factors. In this...

In this paper, we ask under what conditions norms can enhance welfare by mitigating moral hazard in income insurance. We point out a particular role of norms, namely to compensate for insurers’ difficulties in monitoring the behavior of insured individuals. Thus, the functioning of social...