Using the standard non linear income and commodity taxation framework, we examine the optimal policy to be adopted when the same labour disutility can receive two opposite interpretations: taste for leisure and activity limitation. In the absence of complete information about individual...

Existing political economy models of pensions focus on age and productivity. In this paper we incorporate two additional individual characteristics: sex and marital status. We ignore the role of age, by assuming that people vote at the start of their life, and characterize the preferred rate of...

Most industrial countries have traditionally subsidized the provision of higher education. Alternative financing schemes, which rely on larger contributions from students, are being increasingly adopted. Those based on income-contingent loans provide insurance against uncertain educational...

Alleviating poverty for the elderly requires a different approach from other age groups, and a minimum pension is likely to be the only viable option. This paper examines the impact on old age poverty and the fiscal cost of universal minimum old age pensions in 18 Latin American countries using...

Our societies are witnessing a steady increase in longevity. This demographic evolution is accompanied by some convergence across countries, but at the same time substantial longevity inequalities persist within nations across income classes. This Element aims to survey some crucial implications...

The objective of this Element is to provide an analysis of social protection from an economic perspective. It relies on tools and methods widely used in public and insurance economics and comprises four main section besides the introduction. The first section is devoted to the design of social...