Optimal fertility under age-dependent labour productivity

In the so-called Rapport Sauvy (1962), the French demographer Alfred Sauvy argued that Wallonia’s fertility rate was socially suboptimal, and recommended a 20 % rise of fertility, on the grounds that a society with too low a fertility leads to a low-productive economy composed of old workers having old ideas. This paper examines how Sauvy’s intuition can be incorporated in the Samuelsonian optimal fertility model (Samuelson, Int Econ Rev 16:531–538, 1975). We build a four-period OLG model with physical capital and with two generations of workers (young and old), the skills of the latter being subject to some form of decay. We characterize the optimal fertility rate and show that this equalizes, at the margin, the sum of the capital dilution effect (Solow effect) and the labour age-composition effect (Sauvy effect) with the intergenerational redistribution effect (Samuelson effect). Numerical simulations show that it is hard, from a quantitative perspective, to reconcile Sauvy’s recommendation with facts. This leads us to examine other potential determinants of optimal fertility, by introducing technological progress and a more general social welfare function.     

Pension Schemes Comparison between EEC Countries*

Abstract. A lot of research has been made on macroeconomic spending on the financing of retirement, most of it taking into account demographic evolution. On the other hand, little research has gone into international comparisons that shed more light on the standards of living that are guaranteed after retirement, and on the flexibility and accessibility of public pension schemes. It is a study of this type that we have carried out for 11 member-states of the EEC (Greece having been left out because of its lack of statistics). In this article, we construct an index that reflects the levels of protection that are offered to the aged by the “first pillar” and under the most general conditions. On the basis of a series of important criteria (conditions for access, flexibility, intervention levels, etc.), we calculated an average of the scores for each criterion. These averages are then used to obtain a general score for each country, ranking them against each other relative to the quality of their respective pension schemes.     

Cooperative provision of indivisible public goods

A community faces the obligation of providing an indivisible public good that each of its members is able to provide at a certain cost. The solution is to rely on the member who can provide the public good at the lowest cost, with a due compensation from the other members. This problem has been studied in a non-cooperative setting by Kleindorfer and Sertel (J Econ Theory 64:20–34, 1994). They propose an auction mechanism that results in an interval of possible individual contributions whose lower bound is the equal division. Here, instead we take a cooperative stand point by modelling this problem as a cost sharing game that turns out to be a ‘reverse’ airport game whose core is shown to have a regular structure. This enables an easy calculation of the nucleolus that happens to define the upper bound of the Kleindorfer–Sertel interval. The Shapley value instead is not an appropriate solution in this context because it may imply compensations to non-providers.     

Wage Bargaining with On‐the‐Job Search: Theory and Evidence

Most applications of Nash bargaining over wages ignore between‐employer competition for labor services and attribute all of the workers' rent to their bargaining power. In this paper, we write and estimate an equilibrium model with strategic wage bargaining and on‐the‐job search and use it to take another look at the determinants of wages in France. There are three essential determinants of wages in our model: productivity, competition between employers resulting from on‐the‐job search, and the workers' bargaining power. We find that between‐firm competition matters a lot in the determination of wages, because it is quantitatively more important than wage bargaining à la Nash in raising wages above the workers' “reservation wages,” defined as out‐of‐work income. In particular, we detect no significant bargaining power for intermediate‐ and low‐skilled workers, and a modestly positive bargaining power for high‐skilled workers.     

Influence and Complementarity of Follow-on Managerial Innovations within a Public Organization

Public Organization Review - The objective of this research is to explore the relations between different categories of managerial innovations in public organizations. This paper aims to...     

Randomize groups, not individuals: a strategy for improving early childhood programs

Until the past few years, our nation's approach to designing federal programs for preschool-age children lacked coherence and paid little attention to what had worked (and not worked) in the past. In this article, the authors propose that credible information useful for designing effective programs will require the ongoing, systematic development and evaluation of alternative approaches for the improvement of large-scale early childhood programs. The research should place greater reliance on experiments in which existing groups of individuals, such as intact classes or preschool agencies, are randomly assigned to implement competing early education programs or program components. Randomizing groups, rather than individual children, changes the research question from "What works?" to "What works better?" yielding more useful information than is currently available about which preschool approaches ought to be strongly embedded in our nation's social policy.