IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cor/louvrp/1051.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Can varying social insurance contributions improve labour market efficiency?

Author

Listed:
  • DREZE, Jacques H.

Abstract

This paper, prepared for an lEA Conference in honour of James Meade on The Economics of Partnership, analyses the rationale and prospects for using cyclical variations in Social Insurance Contributions (SIC) as a means to reconcile wage flexibility with efficient risk-sharing between capital and labour. The idea of cyclical variations in SIC was introduced by Meade in 1938 with the objective of reconciling wage flexibility with stability of aggregate demand. The emphasis here is placed instead on the (complementary) risk-sharing aspect. A minimal theoretical model of a productive economy with a stock market is used to characterise wages compatible with efficient risk-sharing. Transfers corresponding to the difference between these risk-sharing wages and competitive wages have zero present value on capital markets and could be implemented in alternative ways, the practical merits of which are discussed. A specific proposal is singled out for consideration. The paper also contains a brief discussion of another approach, namely the collection of SIC as profit shares a la Weitzman.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • DREZE, Jacques H., 1993. "Can varying social insurance contributions improve labour market efficiency?," LIDAM Reprints CORE 1051, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cor:louvrp:1051
    Note: In : International Economic Association Conference, 106, 161-200, 1993
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cor:louvrp:1051. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alain GILLIS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/coreebe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.