Without policy reforms, the aging of the U.S. population is likely to increase the burden of the currently unfunded Social Security and Medicare systems. In this paper we build an applied general equilibrium model and incorporate the population projections made by the Social Security Administration (SSA) to evaluate the macroeconomic and welfare implications of alternative fiscal responses to t...

Public moral reasoning is shown to differ in three specific ways from what is conventionally assumed in modern optimal tax theory. Large majorities of survey respondents resist costless redistribution of arbitrarily determined unequal outcomes and prefer justifying tax progressivity based on benefit received rather than on diminishing marginal social welfare of income. These attitudes are shown...

Inherited wealth creates a second distinguishing characteristic of individuals, in addition to earning abilities. We incorporate this fact into a model of optimal labor income taxation, with bequests motivated by joy of giving. We …nd that taxes on bequests or on inheritances allow further redistribution, if in the parent generation initial wealth and earning abilities are positively related. O...

Previous research has found parental divorce to have negative effects on children’s educational attainment; in addition, it has been noted that the effects of divorce are not the same in all western societies. However, research on Catholic and southern European countries is missing. The aim of this paper is to add to the research on the relation between parental divorce and the educational atta...

China’s social welfare reform since the mid-1980s has been characterized as incremental and fragmented in three dimensions—social insurance, privatization, and targeting. This paper attempts to explore the micro-foundation of China’s urban social welfare reform by examining the diverse social welfare preferences and the cleavages among societal groups. It argues that the diversity of the societ...

This paper considers the effects of aging in a currency union with endogenous growth. It is shown that mortality, labour supply and social security funding have no effect on inflation and pose therefore no problems for monetary integration. On the other hand, the demand for medical care speeds up inflation. Hence, if a currency union accepts a new member in which families have a relatively high...

Objectives: Our research seeks to examine the correlation between the presence of physical medicine and rehabilitation journals in social networks and the SJR impact factor. Methods: We carried out a correlation study. For the research, we took into account all physical medicine and rehabilitation journals included in the SCImago Journal Rank. The number of followers on Twitter, Facebook, YouT...

This article introduces the reader to this special issue on Systems Change and highlights six lessons learned about theory, methods, and interventions for systems change that emerged across the included articles. The value of a systems approach to systems change is examined, including the need for frameworks, methods, and change activities that attend to the characteristics of systems.

In their recent work, Matsumura and Ogawa (2012) showed that in the context of a mixed duopoly, equilibrium social welfare is higher in price-setting competition than in quantity-setting competition. We found that when the strength of network effects is sufficiently high, the above result is totally reversed; thus, in a mixed duopoly, the presence of network effects weakens the superiority of p...