The paper studies the popular hypothesis that ”hiding” taxes from taxpayers, such as by nominally dividing the payroll tax between employees and employers, leads to higher taxes. To test the hypothesis, I analyze payroll taxes and pension spending in a sample of 89 countries and find that countries where employers nominally pay a higher share of the payroll tax tend to have lower taxes and smal...

Leaving Poverty Behind? The Effects of Generous Income Support Paired with Activation We evaluate a comprehensive activation program in Norway targeted at hard-to-employ social assistance claimants with reduced work capacity. The program offers a combination of tailored rehabilitation, training and job practice, and a generous, stable, and non-meanstested benefit. Its main aims are to mitigate ...

This paper explores the labor supply effects of a large-scale policy change in the Austrian disability insurance program, which tightened eligibility criteria for men above a certain age. Using administrative data on the universe of Austrian private-sector employees, the results of difference-in-difference type regressions suggest a substantial and statistically significant decline in disabilit...

Immigrant Networks and the Take-Up of Disability Programs: Evidence from US Census Data This paper examines the role of ethnic networks in disability program take-up among working-age immigrants in the United States. We find that even when controlling for country of origin and area of residence fixed effects, immigrants residing amidst a large number of co-ethnics are more likely to receive dis...

This paper computes first the internal rates of return of different population cohorts. Secondly, we study the intragenerational aspects by calculating the returns over life-time contributions for workers of different categories, grouped by earnings, gender and marital status. Under a set of assumptions on contribution rates and wage profiles –in absence of actual data on longitudinal contribut...

Early Interventions and Disability Insurance: Experience from a Field Experiment This paper estimates the effects of early interventions in the Swedish sickness insurance system. The aim of the interventions is to screen and, further to, rehabilitate sick listed individuals. We find that the early interventions – in contrast to what is expected – increase the inflow into disability benefits by ...

We propose an extended PAYG social security system that conditions pension benefits on the aggregate wage sum and on the wage of one’s children. The latter increases parents’ incentives to provide their children with good within-family education. However, since wages depend stochastically on parents’ unobservable investment in their children’s human capital, some insurance against the productiv...

Because life annuities can increase the level and decrease the volatility of lifetime consumption, economists have long been puzzled by the low demand for life annuities. One potential rational explanation is that adverse selection drives up life annuity prices, which drives down demand. We study the choice between life annuities and lump sums made by 32,000 retiring public employees. These uni...

In this paper, I analyze consumption, aggregate savings,output and welfare implications of …ve di¤erent social security arragements whenever there is demographic uncertanity. Following Bohn(2002), I analyze the e¤ect of an uncetain population growth in an extended version of a modi…ed Life-cycle model developed by Gertler(1999). Population growth dampens savings and output under all arrangement...

Welfare-state measures often tend to persist even when they seem to have become suboptimal due to changes in the economic environment. This paper proposes an information-based explanation for this welfare-state persistence. I present a structural model where rationally inattentive voters decide upon implementations and removals of social insurance. In this model, welfarestate persistence arises...