A means tested minimum income for old age creates in incentive for some not to save for old age and instead to free ride. Recent literature is undecided to what extent this inefficient savings distortion should be even worse. In a simple optimal taxation framework we show that it is Pareto...

A means tested minimum income for old age creates an incentive for some not to save for old age and instead to free ride. Recent literature is undecided to what extent this inefficient savings distortion should be addressed by a compulsory pension system because resulting labour-leisure...

We treat fiscal equalisation as an insurance device against regional tax revenue variance. This insurance comes at the price of 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...

We distinguish two ways in which national public pension systems can distort intra-EU movements of workers. First, each national pension system may display an inherent mobility bias. We propose the ‘Lodge Test’ to identify any such bias and show that many national pension systems in the EU...

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...

If there is a means tested basic income for old age, households will tend to reduce precautionary savings to an inefficiently low level. This might serve as a justification for a public pension system. In a representative agent framework, indeed, the introduction of a compulsory pension s ystem...