Social Insurance. I. M. Rubinow

I-28: Anti M

Improving the Feshbach–Rubinow approximation

The binding energy of three identical bosons is estimated by coupled differential equations which generalise the Feshbach–Rubinow approximation. This method turns out to be rather efficient, especially in the limit of vanishing binding.

Social Norms in Social Insurance

We analyze how insurance arrangements, labor supply, moral hazard and outright cheating are affected by social norms. One question is under what conditions norms may improve social welfare. Another is under what conditions people should be allowed to opt out of social insurance. We introduce an informal production sector to analyze the consequences of alternative assumptions about the informati...

Politically sustainable social insurance

Private information underpins a basic social trade-off between incentives and inequality. Normative models of dynamic incentive provision explore the optimal evolution of this trade-off. Many prescribe relentlessly increasing levels of inequality. Indeed, under a variety of standard preference assumptions, an immiseration result obtains: a privileged measure zero set of agents obtain all resour...

Politically Credible Social Insurance

This paper considers political credibility of allocations in settings with dynamic private information. It embeds a benchmark dynamic moral environment into political economy games which feature repeated voting over mechanisms. Optimal politically credible allocations are shown to solve virtual planning problems with social discount factors in excess of the private one. JEL codes: C73, D72, D82...