The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical evaluation of theoretical modelshowing that shifting from pay-as-you-go to funded social security schemes can be made Pareto-improving. Further, it argues that what often makes a reform toward funded schemes attractive is a number of additional...

The European Union consists of a wide variety of welfare states with social insurance schemes ranging from those providing earnings related benefits (Bismarckian)to flat rate benefits (Beveridgean)systems. The conventional wisdom is that with factor mobility poor people have incentives to move...

This paper studies the role of family size in the design of optimal income taxation. We consider a second best setting where the government observes the number of children and the income of the parents but not their productivity.

This paper shows tha shifting the portfolio allocation of the social security trust fund towards more equity investment, ceteris paribus, reduces the aggregate capital stock as well as the average consumption level of all individuals except the poor retirees who receive an increase but at the...