Alexander Kemnitz

Growth and social security: the role of human capital

This paper studies the growth and efficiency effects of pay-as-you-go financed social security when human capital is the engine of growth. Employing a variant of the Lucas (1988) model with overlapping generations, it is shown that a properly designed unfunded social security system leads to higher output growth than a fully funded one. Furthermore, the economy with unfunded social security is efficient while the other one is not. These results stand in sharp contrast to those that obtain in models where economic growth is driven by physical capital accumulation.

Endogenous growth and the gains from immigration

Abstract This note is concerned with the welfare implications of immigration when growth is endogenous. In contrast to standard neoclassical results, immigration will benefit an arbitrary native if and only if the average immigrant possesses more capital than the average native.

Demographic Structure and the Political Economy of Education Subsidies

This paper investigates the politico-economic impact of a societys age structure on the extent of public funding of education. Education subsidies serve to internalize positive spillovers of human capital investment, but redistribute resources from the working old to the non-working young, thus creating a conflict of interest between the two generations. The political process is characterized by a representative democracy.In the steady state, high rates of population growth lead to oversubsidization, while low rates lead to undersubsidization, relative to a lifetime income maximizing situation. Population aging leads to higher educational subsidies in the politico-economic equilibrium. Starting from a situation of undersubsidization, this raises lifetime incomes.

University Funding Reform, Competition, and Teaching Quality

This paper explores the impact of university funding reform on teaching quality competition. It shows that a graduate tax with differentiated, but state-regulated fees maximises the higher education surplus, whereas student grants as well as pure and income contingent loans do not. Fee autonomy for universities leads to results inferior to properly state controlled fees and can make the majority of students even worse off than a central student assignment system with very poor teaching incentives.

A Simple Model of Health Insurance Competition

This paper investigates competition between health insurance companies under different financing regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German health care reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find that contribution rate competition yields lower company profits and higher consumer welfare than premia competition when switching between insurance companies is costly.

On the Political Economy of Low Skilled Immigration and the Welfare State

This paper inquires into the collective decision making on both unemployment insurance and immigration. It is shown that low skill immigration typically increases the contribution rate to the unemployment insurance system. This can translate into higher benefits, the increase of the economy-wide unemployment rate nonwithstanding. The host country allows for immigration only if high skilled natives are sufficiently powerful. Furthermore, political rights of immigrants are restricted to a minimum.

Gender Power, Fertility, and Family Policy

The birth of children often shifts the power balance within a family. If family decisions are made according to the spouses’ welfare function, this shift in power may lead to a time consistency problem. The allocation of resources after the birth of children may differ from the ex-ante optimal choice. In a model of cooperative decision making within a family, we show that this time consistency problem leads to a systematic downward bias in fertility choices. By keeping fertility low, families try to mitigate the ex-ante undesired shift in the power balance. This bias in fertility choices provides scope for welfare enhancing policy intervention. We discuss the extent to which existing measures in family policy are suitable to overcome the fertility bias.

Unemployment Insurance, Immigrants' Skills, and Native Earnings

This paper investigates the effect of immigration on native earnings in the presence of unemployment and various social insurance policies. If immigration decreases the economy-wide skill ratio and the welfare state is actuarially fair, total native earnings increase under the constant-replacement-ratio policy, while they decrease under both the constant-benefit and the constant-average-income policy. If, however, immigrants improve the economy-wide skill ratio, natives as a whole gain unambiguously, but most under a constant benefit. The ranking between social policies is robust with respect to general taxation, but can reverse when native educational choices are endogenous.