According to conventional wisdom, intergenerational transfers can survive, in the absence of altruism, only if the old are net recipients. I prove that this need not hold in an overlapping generations model with a fixed factor. For example, the middle-aged owning land may gain by providing...

The paper employs a model of dynamic price competition to study how international commodity taxation affects the stability of collusive agreements when producers in an international duopoly agree not to export into each other’s home market. We consider both the choice of international tax...

The mobility of labor reduces national incentives to invest in internationally applicable education. The European Union could overcome this by allowing member states to institute graduate taxes or income-contingent loans, collected also from migrants. Graduate taxes or income-contingent loans...

This paper reports on a two-task principal agent experiment in which only one task is contractible. The principal can either offer a piece-rate contract or a (voluntary) bonus to the agent. Bonus contracts strongly outperform piece-rate contracts. Many principals reward high effort on both tasks...

We use laboratory experiments to investigate the effect that assuming rational expectations has on structural inference in a dynamic discrete decision problem. Our design induces preferences up to the subjective rate of time preference, leaving unrestricted both this parameter and subjects’...

A PAYGO system may serve as insurance against not having children and as an enforcement device for ungrateful children who are unwilling to pay their parents a pension. In fact, the latter was Bismarck’s historic motive for introducing this system. It is true that the PAYGO system reduces the...

The main purpose of this introductory chapter is to be briefly review the ongoing debate in the field of sustainability and economic growth. First we provide an introduction to current empirical research. Results of empirical analyses as well as methodological problems concerning the analysis of...

This paper presents a model of educational production that tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government...