Capital-skill Complementarity and the Redistributive Effects of Social Security Reform

This paper analyses the general equilibrium implications of reforming pay-as-you-go pension systems in an economy with heterogeneous agents, human capital investment and capital-skill complementarity. It shows that increasing funding delivers in the long run higher physical and human capital and therefore higher output, but also higher wage and income inequality. The latter affects preferences over the degree of redistribution of e remaining pay-as-you-go component: despite the greater role that edistribution could perform in the new steady state, we find a preference for lower redistribution for a larger group of the population.capital-skill complementarity, inter and intragenerational redistribution, pay-as-you-go, fully funded

Capital-skill Complementarity and the Redistributive Effects of Social Security Reform

This paper analyses the general equilibrium implications of reforming pay-as-you-go pension systems in an economy with heterogeneous agents, human capital investment and capital-skill complementarity. It shows that increasing funding delivers in the long run higher physical and human capital and therefore higher output, but also higher wage and income inequality. The latter affects preferences over the degree of redistribution of e remaining pay-as-you-go component: despite the greater role that edistribution could perform in the new steady state, we find a preference for lower redistribution for a larger group of the population

On the formation of international migration policies when no country has an exclusive policy-setting say

This paper identifies the migration policies that emerge when both the sending country and the receiving country wield power to set migration quotas, when controlling migration is costly, and when the decision how much human capital to acquire depends, among other things, on the migration policies. The paper analyzes the endogenous formation of bilateral agreements in the shape of transfers to support migration controls, and in the shape of joint arrangements regarding the migration policy and the cost-sharing of its implementation. The paper shows that in equilibrium both the sending country and the receiving country can participate in setting the migration policy, that bilateral agreements can arise as a welfare-improving mechanism, and that the sending country can gain from migration even when it does not set its preferred policy.Human capital formation, International migration, Migration policies, Welfare analysis, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, Labor and Human Capital, F22, I30, J24, J61,

A multi-material transport problem and its convex relaxation via rectifiable GG-currents

In this paper we study a variant of the branched transportation problem, that we call multi-material transport problem. This is a transportation problem, where distinct commodities are transported simultaneously along a network. The cost of the transportation depends on the network used to move the masses, as it is common in models studied in branched transportation. The main novelty is that in our model the cost per unit length of the network does not depend only on the total flow, but on the actual quantity of each commodity. This allows to take into account different interactions between the transported goods. We propose an Eulerian formulation of the discrete problem, describing the flow of each commodity through every point of the network. We provide minimal assumptions on the cost, under which existence of solutions can be proved. Moreover, we prove that, under mild additional assumptions, the problem can be rephrased as a mass minimization problem in a class of rectifiable currents with coefficients in a group, allowing to introduce a notion of calibration. The latter result is new even in the well studied framework of the "single-material" branched transportation.Comment: Accepted: SIAM J. Math. Ana

Cittadini senza diritti: abitare e lavorare a Milano da clandestini

Lo scopo di questo rapporto è di presentare le principali caratteristiche socio-demografiche dell’utenza Naga (Associazione Volontaria di Assistenza SocioSanitaria e per i Diritti di Stranieri e Nomadi Onlus), che costituisce una delle più grandi banche dati sull’immigrazione irregolare. A tal fine analizzeremo i dati contenuti nelle cartelle mediche del Naga per i pazienti che sono stati registrati tra il gennaio 2000 e il dicembre 2006, soffermandoci sulla loro nazionalità, genere, situazione familiare, anzianità migratoria, livello di istruzione, condizione lavorativa e situazione abitativa. Dall’analisi emerge un quadro delle caratteristiche e delle condizioni dei migranti privi di permesso di soggiorno del tutto diverso da quello spesso proposto nel dibattito politico e mediatico italiano. Gli immigrati irregolari sono giovani giunti di recente in Italia, ma hanno livelli di istruzione e tassi di occupazione che eguagliano – se non addirittura superano – quelli della popolazione residente in Italia. Le loro condizioni socioabitative, invece, sono assolutamente critiche e lontanissime dagli standard italiani

Employment of Undocumented Immigrants and the Prospect of Legal Status: Evidence from an Amnesty Program

This paper estimates the causal effect of the prospect of legal status on the employment outcomes of undocumented immigrants. Our identification strategy exploits a natural experiment provided by the 2002 amnesty program in Italy that introduced an exogenous discontinuity in eligibility based on date of arrival. We find that the prospect of legal status significantly increases the employment probability of immigrants that are potentially eligible for the amnesty relative to other undocumented immigrants. The size of the estimated effect is equivalent to about two thirds of the increase in employment that undocumented immigrants in our sample normally experience in their first year after arrival in Italy. These findings are robust to several falsification exercises

The role of planar symmetry and of symmetry constraints in the proof of existence of solutions to some scalar field equations

This paper deals with some recent results for scalar field equations in the case of a potential which converges from above to a limit at infinity. In particular, we shall collect some of the results of the authors which have contributed to partially answer a conjecture of Wei and Yan and we shall announce some results in a forthcoming paper to the aim of giving a short survey which collects the main ideas based on the use of symmetry assumptions and of symmetry methods introduced for the above problem