The paper identifies the sustainable rate of return (to be credited on all account balances) for a generic Defined-Contribution pension scheme regardless of its degree of funding.

Starting from a reconstruction of the political context in which the Italian 1995 pension reform took shape, this paper reviews the essential features of the 1995 and post-1995 legislation and assesses its fundamental shortcomings. A straightforward theoretical discussion highlights both the...

The paper inquires into Notional Defined Contribution pension schemes, which retain the pay-as-you-go financing method while adopting the award and indexation formulas typical of funded, defined-contribution systems. It inquires the properties of the new arrangement and compares its theoretical...

The aim of this paper is to cast the problem of the alternative between skilled, time-intensive and unskilled activities within an analytical framework wherein the individuals' choice problem is addressed in terms of alternative time-consuming activities rather than alternative bundles of goods...

The aim of this paper is to propose an analytical framework, wherein the individuals' choice problem is addressed in terms of alternative time‐consuming activities rather than in terms of alternative bundles of goods and services. In particular, the paper reverses Becker's (1965) proposal to...

The paper suggests that casting the choice problem in terms of alternative time-consuming activities can foster the fruitful cross-fertilization between economics and psychology along the lines suggested by Scitovsky in the Joyless Economy. The first part emphasizes how mainstream, utility-based...

In contrast with the "missing micro-foundations" argument against Keynes’s macro­economics, the paper argues that it is the present state of microeconomics that needs more solid "Keynesian foundations". It is in particular Keynes’s understanding of investors’ behaviour that can be...

In order to spread notional capital accrued at retirement by members of a cohort over life expectancy, pay-as-you-go notional-defined-contribution (payg-ndc) scheme uses multipliers (different by retirement age) called conversion coefficients. These are backward-looking (b.l.) in that they relay...