We model an overlapping-generations economy with two skill levels: skilled and unskilled. The welfare-state is modeled simply by a proportional tax on labor income to finance a demogrant in a balanced-budget manner. Therefore, some (the unskilled workers and old retirees) are net beneficiaries...

The intratemporal redistribution feature of the welfare state makes it an attractive destination for immigrants, particularly for low-skill immigrants. George Borjas (1994) reports that foreign-born households in the United States accounted for 10 percent of households receiving public...

We develop a simple information-based model of FDI flows. On the one hand, the relative abundance of "intangible capital in specialized industries in the source countries, which presumably generates expertise in screening investment projects in the host countries, enhances FDI flows. On the...

The aging of the population shakes the public finance of pay-as-you-go social security systems. We develop a political-economy framework in which this demographic change leads to the downsizing of the social security system, and, as a consequence, to the emergence of supplemental individual...

The extent of taxation and redistribution Policy is generally determined as a political-economy equilibrium by a balance between those who gain from higher taxes/transfers and those who lose. In a stylized model of migration and human capital formation, we show - somewhat against the...

We argue that the degree of coordination among the member states potentially contribute a great deal to our understanding of observed policy differences between the EU and the US as economic unions: the generosity of the welfare state and the skill composition of migration.

In this paper we examine the properties of the optimal linearestate tax in the presence of a complete set of tax instrumentsavailable to the social planner. We allow for both types of bequestmotives, namely altruistic and accidental. We examine the casefor estate taxation which seems to be the...

Minimum wage legislation is a standard policy tool in most countries. However, the overall merits of minimum wage are controversial due to its potential adverse effects on unemployment. In this paper we construct a simple model in which minimum wage plays an important re-distributive role,...

We illustrate a novel informational feature of education, which the government may utilize. Discretionary decisions of individuals to acquire education may serve as an additional signal (to earned labor income) on the underlying unobserved innate earning ability, thereby mitigating the...

We consider a model of prejudice-driven discrimination, where the advantaged 'tall' discriminate against the disadvantaged 'short'. We employ an egalitarian social welfare function to compare anti-discrimination legal rules with a non-discriminatory ('height-blind') income tax.