A major shortcoming of the theoretical literature on international transfers is that it is not at all clear whether the welfare results obtained are consistent with transfers flowing from rich to poor nations. This is because economists hardly ever model the difference in wealth between the...

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 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...

We develop a simple yet realistic model of income insurance, where the individual’s ability and willingness to work is treated as a continuous variable. In this framework, income insurance not only provides income smoothing, it also relieves the individual from particularly burdensome work. As...

This paper examines the economic consequences of manipulation of social insurance benefits. Using administrative data of the public long-term care insurance (LTCI) in Japan, we document novel discontinuity and bunching in the distribution of health scores that determine benefit levels for LTCI....

Work requirements can make it easier to screen the poor from the non-poor. They can also affect future poverty by changing the poors' incentive to invest in their income capacity. The novelty of our study is the focus on long term poverty. We find that the argument for using work requirements as...

If there is a means tested basic income for old age, households will tend to reduce precautionary savings to an inefficiently low level. This might serve as a justification for a public pension system. In a representative agent framework, indeed, the introduction of a compulsory pension system...

Although one-third of workers in the USA and Germany contract supplementary private disability insurance (DI), most studies on the design of public DI systems abstract from private DI. Using unique and comprehensive contract data from a major German insurance company and representative survey...