This article describes the legislative history of the Social Security Amendments of 1977 and contains a summary of the amendments. The major provisions revise the benefit structure so that future replacement rates--initial benefits as a percent of previous earnings--will be relatively stable and revise the tax structure to restore the financial soundness of the program in the short range and in...

Regional integration proposals often require agreements between countries that differ in geographic size, resource endowments, transportation assets, technologies, and product quality. In this asymmetric setting, questions arise about the potential for mutual gains and the distribution of benefits among industries and workers in each country. This paper examines how regional integration between...

We use a standard repeated game framework and assume imperfect competition to examine how the feasibility of trade agreements is affected by the presence of asymmetries in market size, wage levels and labor productivities. The results regarding asymmetries in market size are consistent with the traditional literature: the country with the larger market is more likely to defect and transfers fro...

In renewable resource industries, labor is commonly paid with a share of operating profit rather than with a per unit-of-effort wage. This paper shows that the sharing agreements interact with fluctuations in the natural capital stock to cause inefficient investment levels and skew industry rents toward labor. As a consequence, optimal regulatory policy for such industries must account for the ...

This paper investigates under which conditions firms use fixed-term contracts, subcontracted and freelance work. Using a probit model which accounts for unobserved heterogeneity, we find that positive changes in expected or actual turnover are associated with a higher probability of employing atypical work, which suggests that these forms of employment are used as means of adjustment. Other imp...

We present a model for the vehicle and crew scheduling problem in urban public transport systems by combining models for vehicle and crew scheduling that cover a great variety of real world aspects, especially constraints for crews resulting from wage agreements and internal regulations. The main part of the model consists of a set partitioning formulation to cover the desired trips of the sche...

Many thanks go to Delphine Corteel and Steve Casper for comments on a previous version, as well as to the participants in seminars organised by the European Metalworkers' Federation for their criticisms and comments. The final responsibility is, as usual, only mine. Abstract This paper deals with the situation in the European car industry since the crisis of the early 1990s. After a short revie...

The end of the Cold War has called into question the activities of the national laboratories and, more generally, the level of support now given to federal intramural research in the United States. This paper seeks to analyze the potential role of the laboratories, with particular attention to the possibility, on the one hand, of integrating private technology development into the laboratory's ...

Altruism, Cooperation, and Efficiency: Agricultural Production in Polygynous Households Altruism among family members can, in some cases, inhibit cooperation by increasing the utility that players expect to receive in a non-cooperative equilibrium. To test this, we examine agricultural productivity in polygynous households in West Africa. We find that cooperation is greater – production is more...

Cooperative agreements among firms to coordinate R&D investments and share knowledge or coordination among nations to reduce trade barriers or to provide global public goods usually proves difficult due to free-rider incentives. In this paper, we propose a sharing scheme for the distribution of the gains from cooperation for games with externalities and heterogeneous players in order to mitigat...