In a recent paper, Homburg and Richter have argued that with free mobility of labor within a common labor market there is a need to harmonize and even consolidate pay-as-you-go financed national public pension systems to reach an efficient allocation of labor. We show that with free and...

In this paper we study how promoting product market competition by reducing mark-ups or by increasing productivity are able to complement labor market reforms. We use a simple general equilibrium model with different types of labor. The bottom-line of the paper is that product market reforms...

The paper shows that adding social security based on a pay-as-you-go principle (PAYG) prevents countries from successfully harmonizing their individual social security systems. As claimed in the paper, the PAYG systems are extremely complicated to harmonize when the labour force is mobile among...