The arrival of new information helps financial markets to value assets, but it may has the side-effect of increasing their volatilities. A better knowledge of the mechanism that links relevant news and stock prices would help both private and institutional agents to improve the calibration of...

We provide a long term perspective on the individual retirement behavior and on the future of retirement by emphasizing the role of (negative) income effects. We consider a political economic theoretical framework, with actuarial "fair" and "unfair" early retirement schemes, and derive a...

We provide a long-term perspective on the individual retirement behaviour and on the future of retirement. In a Markovian political economic theoretical framework, in which incentives to retire early are embedded, we derive a political equilibrium with positive social security contribution rates...

We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labor market risk. Different countries' locations along this trade-off represent stable, hard to modify, politico-economic equilibria. We...

We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labour market risk. The mix of quantity restrictions and price regulations adopted by the various countries would seem to correspond to a...

We provide a long term perspective on the individual retirement behavior and on the future of early retirement. In a cross-country sample, we find that total pension spending depends positively on the degree of early retirement and on the share of elderly in the population, which increase the...

We analyze risk sharing and fiscal spending in a two-region model with sequentially complete markets. Fiscal policy is determined by majority voting. When policy setting is decentralized, regions choose pro-cyclical fiscal spending in an attempt to manipulate security prices to their benefit....

Why are Bismarckian social security systems associated with larger public pension expenditures, a smaller fraction of private pension and lower income in-equality than Beveridgean systems? These facts are puzzling for political economy theories of social security which predict that Beveridgean...

Ageing is the major challenge for the PAYG pension systems in developed countries. Most of them are undergoing reforms in order to adapt to the new demographic reality. The package of reforms implemented includes increasing the retirement age, reducing the replacement rate, or introducing a...