Maksymilian Kwiek

Efficient voting with penalties

Simple majority does not reflect the intensity of voters’ preferences. This paper presents an efficient collective choice mechanism when the choice is binary and the designer may use non-trasferable punishments to persuade agents to reveal their private information. The designer faces a dilemma – a punishment may induce a more correct choice, but its cost is socially wasteful. The efficient mechanism is a weighted majority. Weight of each individual is known ex ante and no punishments applied if preferences are relatively homogenous. Eliciting types through punishments in order to construct type-specific weights should occur if preference intensity is relatively heterogeneous, or if voters preferences represent a larger population.

Political sustainability of unfunded pensions in an endogenous growth model

Cooley and Soares (1999) show that a pay-as-you-go (unfunded) pension system can be an outcome of a political equilibrium even without intergenerational altruism. This note assumes an endogenous growth model rather than an exogenous one. This assumption establishes a link between the savings rate and economic growth. Since the introduction of a pay-as-you-go system lowers the savings rate, it has an adverse effect on the growth rate and hence on the future interest rate and future pensions. When this additional incentive is taken into account, the level of the pay-as-you-go system chosen in political equilibrium can be lower or even, depending on calibration values, disappear entirely, relative to the exogenous growth model of Cooley and Soares.