Armut, Reichtum und Humankapital Zu den Beziehungen zwischen Bildung, Lebenseinkommen, Besteuerung und staatlicher Umverteilung

SummaryThe paper is based on an individual life-cycle model, which describes the purely economic components of human capital. The present value of human capital is determined by all future income flows, which at the same time constitute the individual as well as the total tax base of a nation. Therefore, the income of the productive population determines the total tax revenue, which is spent for public goods (including education) and transfers (for poverty reduction). The efficient design of the education system (by private and public education investments) determines the quality of the human capital stock as well as the future gross income flows. The costs of public goods and the transfer expenditures have to be financed from the total tax revenue, which also affects the individual tax burden via the specific tax bases and tax rates. Especially the redistribution of income is connected with serious disincentives, influencing the preferences for work and leisure as well as for consumption and saving.An efficient tax and transfer system being accompanied by an education system financed in public private partnership, which treats equally labor and capital income, sets positive incentives for the formation of human, financial, and real capital. An important prerequisite for a sustainable growth process is the efficient design of the social security system, being based on the family as well as a collective risk equalization scheme. If that system is diminishing absolute poverty in an appropriate time period by transfers and vocational education measures for the grown-up as well as high quality primary, secondary and tertiary education programs for the children, the transfer expenditure would decrease and the tax bases (income and consumption) increase, lowering the burden on the productive population. For the first time, this micro model presented in this paper pools all the relevant variables for development within a simple life-cycle model, which can also be used for a powerful analysis of the current failures in existing tax and transfer schemes and fruitful empirical investigations.

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Optimal Life Cycle Unemployment Insurance

The American Economic Review ◽

10.1257/aer.20111559 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 105 (2) ◽

pp. 816-859 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Claudio Michelacci ◽

Hernán Ruffo

Keyword(s):

Human Capital ◽

Life Cycle ◽

Moral Hazard ◽

Unemployment Insurance ◽

Older Workers ◽

Life Cycle Model ◽

Cycle Model ◽

Welfare Gains ◽

High Return ◽

Unemployment Risk

We argue that US welfare would rise if unemployment insurance were increased for younger and decreased for older workers. This is because the young tend to lack the means to smooth consumption during unemployment and want jobs to accumulate high-return human capital. So unemployment insurance is most valuable to them, while moral hazard is mild. By calibrating a life cycle model with unemployment risk and endogenous search effort, we find that allowing unemployment replacement rates to decline with age yields sizeable welfare gains to US workers. (JEL D91, E24, J13, J64, J65)

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The overlapping generations model

Introduction to Computational Economics Using Fortran ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198804390.003.0010 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Hans Fehr ◽

Fabian Kindermann

Keyword(s):

Life Cycle ◽

General Equilibrium ◽

Overlapping Generations ◽

Life Cycle Model ◽

Cycle Model ◽

Consumption Decisions ◽

Factor Markets ◽

The Government ◽

Intergenerational Welfare ◽

The Individual

In discussing the life-cycle model, we focused on the individual-choice problem without taking into account the interaction between households, the production sector of the economy, and the government. In this chapter we take a broader perspective and embed the life-cycle model into a general equilibrium framework. In this framework, prices adjust in order to balance supply and demand in goods and factor markets and the government has to operate under some balanced-budget rules.As in the previous chapter, individuals save in order to smooth consumption over the life cycle. However now, individual savings behaviour endogenously determines the capital stock. This is the central difference from the static general equilibrium model discussed in Chapter 3. Since in our equilibrium framework we have to distinguish households within a given period according to their age or birth year, the models we study are called overlapping generations (OLG) models. In this chapter we introduce the most basic version of the OLG model and discuss the computation of a transition path and the intergenerational welfare effects of policy reforms. In Chapter 7 we extend this baseline model version in various directions. This subsection sketches the economic environment used in this chapter and Chapter 7. We describe the lifetime of people who inhabit the economy as well as their consumption decisions. Then we move on to the production side and the government structure. Finally, the equilibrium conditions for goods and factor markets which close the model are derived. Demographics As in Chapter 5 we assume that households in the model live for three periods. For simplicity we do not account for income and lifespan uncertainty. However, now in each successive period t a new cohort is born, where the number of households Nt in this cohort grows at a rate np,t, i.e. Nt = (1 + np,t)Nt−1. From Figure 6.1 one can understand why this demographic structure is called ‘overlapping generations’. In each period t a cohort Nt is born, but this ‘new’ cohort overlaps with the two cohorts Nt−1 and Nt−2 born in the previous two periods.

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