Suchergebnisse

We treat fiscal equalisation as an insurance device against regional tax revenue variance. This insurance comes at the price of a moral hazard: regional government will spend too little effort on the development of the local tax base. In a simple bargaining model with two identical regions we show that less than total fiscal equalisation combined with lump sum transfers will be optimal. Taking a step back to the constitutional bargaining behind some veil of ignorance which determines the fallback position for later negotiations, we show that writing total fiscal equalisation into the constitution will be optimal.

This paper analyzes how integrated labor markets affect the financing of higher education. For this, we employ a general-equilibrium model with overlapping generations and individuals who differ in their abilities. At the first stage, governments can choose the quality of education and the financing system. At the second stage, individuals make their education and migration decisions given the governmental framework for higher education and the mobility assumptions. In a closed economy and in the presence of imperfect credit markets, a mix of tax- and fee-financing is optimal. In integrated labor markets, countries have an incentive to attract skilled workers and to free-ride on education provided by other countries. When only skilled workers are mobile, there is a sub-optimal shift from taxes to fees and the number of students is too low. When also students can migrate, there is a countervailing force such that maintaining the optimal financial mix becomes possible.

Gegenstand dieser Studie ist ein Vergleich und eine Bewertung von Methoden zur Messung der Produktivität des staatlichen Leistungsangebotes, also von Leistungen die nicht über einen Markt bereitgestellt werden. Die Produktivität gibt das Verhältnis der Ausbringungsmenge (Output) zur Menge der eingesetzten Produktionsfaktoren (Inputs) an. Output wie Input werden im Allgemeinen dabei zu Marktpreisen bewertet, um zu eindimensionalen Einheiten zu gelangen, die die Zusammenfassung unterschiedlicher Güter und Dienstleistungen, die sich im Zeitablauf auch ändern kann, erlaubt.

Demographic realities will soon force developed countries to find ways to pay for longer retirements for more people. In Pension Strategies in Europe and the United States, leading economists analyze topical issues in pension policy, with a focus on raising the retirement age, increasing retirement savings, and the political sustainability of reforms that will accomplish these goals. After a substantive and wide-ranging introduction by the editors that weaves together the demographic and economic strands of the story, the chapters present cutting-edge research, offering both theoretical and empirical analyses. Contributors examine such topics as the reform of key structural features of existing pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension systems, analyzing how benefits should vary with the age of retirement, labor supply elasticity after France's 1993 pension reform, and fiscal response to a demographic shock; the feasibility of PAYG reforms in the United States and the competition among state pension systems that results from labor mobility in Europe; and private, funded systems (increasingly perceived as necessary adjuncts to PAYG systems) in the UK, the US, and the Netherlands, and in terms of individual portfolio management. The editors conclude the volume with a study of recent German and UK reforms and their effects on personal savings.