This paper examines the potential impact of government matching contributions on personal-account participation in the President's Commission on Strengthening Social Security's Model 3 for Social Security reform. Given the government's choice of four plan-design parameters, the magnitude of the...

This article discusses the most recent pension reforms in Austria, which were mainly triggered by the need to alleviate the budgetary pressure stemming from the age structure of the Austrian population. Using synthetic indicators, derived from the government’s budget constraint, the paper...

A citizens' basic income scheme is based on the principles of individuality, universality, and unconditionality; when combined with the notion of meeting "basic needs" it would serve to provide a minimum income guarantee for all adult members of society. However, implementation would entail...

This paper considers implementation issues arising from potential reforms to the United States Social Security system. Many reform proposals involve individually invested accounts, but the corporate governance implications of such accounts have not been fully explored. Existing reform plans will...

Layard, Metcalf and Nickell have formed annual estimates of the union mark-up for unskilled males in the United Kingdom manufacturing sector over the period 1951-1983. We critically assess their estimates as an index of union power and propose a number of hypotheses that determine the union...

We argue that the public financing of education can be understood as an investment in the human capital of young generations, whose profitability is obtained via pension payments. Similarly, we should understand the social security contributions as the repayment of school transfers received in...

At first glance, the collective wage bargaining process in Belgium, being carried at the national level, could be blamed for the persistent high unemployment rate in the Walloon Region, while a process per Region would lead to differentiated wage increases leading towards lower wages in the...

The article exposes and analyses the evolution of the co-management of the social security system by employers and workers representatives in Belgium since they opted for a bismarckian model in 1944 until today. It gives an overview of the arguments of the debates that took place and explicative...

This publication is a non-technical report prepared for Polish Ministry of Economy and Labor. The main goal is to present a comprehensive statistical and econometric analysis of employment, unemployment and participation in Poland in the period 1998-2004 and confront Polish experiences with...

When it comes to retirement income policy, there is a general perception that workers have full 40-year working careers before retiring. Further, it is generally assumed that workers with low lifetime earnings have low earnings in each year during a normal working career. The basic research...