Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The paper outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one allowing...

The paper innovates on the existing optimal taxation literature by taking fertility as endogenous, and allowing for households to be di¤erentiated by ability to raise children, as well as wage rates. In a context where the government cannot observe personal abilities, fertility behaviour...

The effect of transition from centrally planned to market economies on female employment is unclear a-priori. Many studies have pointed out that the emergence of labour markets created obstacles to but also new opportunities for women’s employment. A frequently mentioned explanation of the...

The paper re-examines the idea that a family can be viewed as a community governed by a self-enforcing constitution, and extends existing results in two directions. First, it identi?es circumstances in which a constitution is renegotiation-proof. Second, it introduces parental altruism. The...

In a separate-property jurisdiction, marriage may induce domestic cooperation, and enhance efficiency in the production of children, because it may lend credibility to the prospective main earner's promise to compensate the main childcarer when the children will no longer be economically...

The analysis of the temporal and cross-country patterns of women’s labour market participation and fertility shows how several factors affect the compatibility between childrearing and work (labour market characteristics, social services, and family wealth). The most significant factors which...

We derive the behavioural implications of legislation on the subject of marriage, divorce, de-facto unions, domestic violence, and labour market discrimination, within a game-theoretical frame- work. The predictions are consistent with two empirical obser- vations. One is that, while the...

Estimating saving and fertility simultaneously by the VAR method, we find that social security cover has a positive effect on household saving, and a negative effect on fertility. In Germany, as in other countries where the hypothesis was tested,social security is thus good for growth. A...

In the past decade, several countries, notably France, Spain and Germany, have experienced a joint increase in female participation and fertility, mainly because of national policies aimed at balancing work and family life. In Italy, by contrast, fertility has remained relatively stable (after a...