Philosophers and failures of the state -- Utopia and common ownership -- Cooperation, rationality, values -- Luxury and anarchism -- Planning -- Self-management -- Markets and socialism -- Shareholder socialism -- Universal basic income and basic capital -- Market economy plus welfare state
The transition from an oil-based to a knowledge-based economy requires that the Saudi population dramatically increases its level of human capital. This paper argues that noncognitive skills may be a bottleneck in the formation of human capital and proposes a policy to indirectly strengthen those skills. The core of the proposal is a government-financed gift to each Saudi citizen reaching adult age, the SSGY. -- Saudi Arabia ; Stakeholder Society ; Value Systems ; Economic Development
Since 2002 the German government seeks to stimulate private retirement savings by means of special allowances and tax exemptions - the so-called Riester scheme. We apply matching and panel regression techniques to assess the impact of the Riester scheme on households' propensities to save in a natural experiment framework. Estimation results from both the German Socio-Economic Panel and the SAVE study indicate that private saving was hardly aff ected by the introduction of the Riester scheme. -- Household saving ; saving incentives ; retirement ; Riester scheme ; coarsened exact matching
We develop an economic theory of tolerance where lifestyles and traits are invested with symbolic value by people. Value systems are endogenous and taught by parents to their children. In conjunction with actual behavior, value systems determine the esteem enjoyed by individuals. Intolerant individuals attach all symbolic value to a small number of attributes and are irrespectful of people with different ones. Tolerant people have diversified values and respect social alterity. We study the formation of values attached to both endogenous and exogenous attributes, and identify circumstances under which tolerance spontaneously arises. Policy may affect the evolution of tolerance in distinctive ways, and there may be efficiency as well as equity reasons to promote tolerance.
This paper proposes a model that can be implemented to estimate the willingness to pay for distributive justice, defined as distribution according to desert. We derive a formula that allows one to recover the willingness to pay for distributive justice from fiscal data and the estimated coefficients of a probit regression. Using this formula and data from a 1998 Gallup Social Audit, we find that on average the monetary value of justice for US households amounts to about one fifth of their disposable income. Moreover, we find evidence of markedly heterogeneous preferences for justice along the lines of race and education. Distributive Justice ; Governmental Redistribution ; Fairness
Channeling human resources into the right occupations has historically been a key to economic prosperity. Occupational choices are not only driven by the material rewards associated with the various occupations, but also by the esteem that they confer. We propose a model of endogenous growth in which occupations carry a symbolic value that makes them more or less attractive; the evolution of symbolic values is endogenous and determined by purposive transmission of value systems within families. The model sheds light on the interaction between cultural and economic development and identifies circumstances under which value systems matter for longrun growth. It shows the possibility of culturally determined poverty traps and offers a framework for thinking about the transition from traditional to modern values. symbolic values ; occupational choice ; economic development ; longrun growth
Der international renommierte Ökonom Giacomo Corneo rechnet mit der Wirtschaftspolitik der vergangenen Jahrzehnte in Deutschland ab. Diese hat die Reichen reicher und die Armen ärmer gemacht, aber nicht zu mehr Wachstum geführt – unabhängig von der Farbe der jeweiligen Bundesregierung. Corneo macht einen provokanten, plausiblen und vor allem finanzierbaren Vorschlag für eine neue Wirtschaftspolitik, die Marktdynamik und Wohlstandssicherung auf einmalige Weise verbindet. Ein Buch, das geeignet ist, der wirtschaftspolitischen Debatte eine ganz neue Richtung zu geben.
