The Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB), the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) and the University of Vienna organized a full-day workshop on Capital Taxation after EU Enlargement, which was hosted by the OeNB on January 21, 2005.

We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model with human capital accumulation to evaluate the economic consequences of compulsory services (such as military draft or social services). Our analysis identifies a so far ignored dynamic cost arising from distortions in time allocation over the...

Religious participation is much more widespread in the United States than in Europe, while Europeans tend to view sects more suspiciously than Americans. We propose an explanation for these patterns without assuming differences in preferences or market fundamentals. Religious markets may have...

We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other fields, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the...

We analyse the steady-state equilibrium dynamics of an OLG economy with a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension scheme that relates old-age pensions to previous earnings. Contrary to an economy where PAYG pensions depend on the earnings of those currently working, such an economy may experience complex...

One of the main reasons to include pay-as-you-go (PAYG) schemes in multi-pillared pension systems is that they may entail beneficial risk-sharing and diversification features However, depending on the “pension formula” these features vary significantly for different types of PAYG schemes. We...

We translate the property of linear risk tolerance (hyperbolical Arrow-Pratt index of risk aversion) from the expected-utility framework into a condition on the marginal rate of substitution between return and risk in the mean-variance approach.

We show that, if an individual's utility function exhibits a degree of relative temperance smaller than one, the individual will react, in a plausible way, to each of three common shifts in the stochastic distribution of his wealth, namely to FSD shifts, mean-preserving spreads and increases in...