A social market economy, together with corrective government activities, allows citizens to achieve the highest possible welfare with limited resources. Income and welfare, however, tend to be very unequally distributed in society. Most theories of justice call for some redistribution for a more...

The paper is based on an individual life-cycle model, which describes the purely economic components of human capital. The present value of human capital is determined by all future income flows, which at the same time constitute the individual as well as the total tax base of a nation....

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are an important collective force in the Canadian economy, however the visibility and economic power of small businesses suffer due to their size and frequent turnover. When it comes to the issue of businesses being subject to occupational fraud, the...

Retirement planning is often seen as a tool that may assist individuals to successfully accumulate retirement capital. However, the low level of ‘customization’ of the general information on retirement planning may prompt some individuals to oversimplify their approach to retirement savings...

Although the optimal policy under endogenous fertility has been widely studied, the optimal public intervention under endogenous childbearing age has remained largely unexplored. This paper examines the optimal family policy in a context where the number and the timing of births are chosen by...

We examine how the introduction of self-control preferences influence the trade-off between two fundamental components of a public pension system: the contribution rate and its degree of redistribution. The pension regime affects individuals’ welfare by altering how yielding to temptation...

There exists a wide variety of tax treatments of pensions across the world. And the reasons for such a range of regimes are not clear. This note reviews the general principles of pension taxes and analyses the theoretical foundations of why pension incomes ought to be taxed specifically. To do...

This study investigated the Australian private rental sector (PRS) focusing on institutional change, including formal rules (policies and regulation); organisations and structures; and informal rules (social norms and practices). It also reviewed the PRS in ten countries: Australia, Belgium,...

The question of how governments should choose the frequency of payments has received little attention in the literature on the optimal design of public benefits programs. We propose a simple model in which the government chooses the length of the interval between payments, subject to a tradeoff...

We study optimal tax policies with human capital investment and retirement savings for present-biased agents. Agents are heterogeneous in their innate ability and make risky education investments which determines their labor productivity. We demonstrate that the optimal distortions vary with...