Demographic trends in most developed economies are characterized by rising longevity and decreasing birthrates. These trends endanger the sustainability of the current public pension systems. Therefore social security reform proposals are on the agenda in many countries. This paper demonstrates...

This paper uses an overlapping generations framework to analyze the implications of different financing regimes in the education sector for human capital formation and economic welfare. Agents privately invest in education after they have received a noisy information signal about their...

Recent criticism from different sides has expressed the view that, with scarce resources, there is little justification for massive public funding of higher education. Central to the debate is the conjecture that colleges and universities use their resources inefficiently and focus...

In higher education pure credit market funding leads to underinvestment while income-contingent loans funding tends to produce overinvestment. We analyze whether a market structure in which both funding schemes coexist and compete against each other might restore efficiency of the educational...

In higher education, pure credit market funding leads to underinvestment due to insufficient risk pooling, while pure income-contingent loan funding leads to overinvestment. We analyze whether funding diversity – a market structure in which credit markets coexist alongside income-contingent...

This paper studies the implications of various contracting alternatives between exporting and importing firms on the value of production and international transactions. Since contracts are usually determined when exchange rate is uncertain, we show that under some conditions renegotiating these...

We consider a monopolistic, risk-averse multinational firm which sells and produces at home and abroad under exchange rate uncertainty. First we show that the stochastic exchange rate implies higher production and lower sales in the foreign country. Then we analyze the impact of currency futures...

The paper derives optimal cross hedging and production rules for an exporting firm which faces multiple exchange rate risks. We study the impact of currency cross hedging upon the firm's export production for two countries. We demonstrate that when the forward market for cross hedging is...

In this paper we consider a multinational firm under exchange rate risk in a multiperiod model. We analyze the impact of exchange rate uncertainty and the use of currency futures on the risk-averse firm's decisions about home and foreign production. Without any markets for hedging an increase in...