La presente pubblicazione ottempera agli obblighi previsti dall'art. 1 del decreto legislativo luogotenenziale 31 agosto 1945, n. 660. Ringraziamenti The authors are grateful to Laura Magazzini, Jerome Adda, El-Thalassinos, the participants at the ERSJ Workshop held at Prague, the participants at the PhD biannual meeting of the Department of Economics, for their useful comments and suggestions, MEFOP (Rome) for partially financing the research. The usual disclaimer applies.

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In this work, we find that the zero capital income tax result might not hold, even at the steady state, when the government discount rate differs from the individual one. As intuitive Pigouvian considerations would suggest, capital income should be taxed (subsidized) when the government is less (more) impatient than individuals are. However, a counterintuitive asymmetry emerges as for the steady state since, in the long run, capital income cannot be taxed because of the explosive distortionary effect of positive taxes. The asymmetry is ruled out with a logarithmic utility function because, in this case, the anticipated policy path does not affect current individual choices and thus the cumulative distortionary effect of taxes disappears.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. We characterize optimal consumption, capital and population growth rates of a production economy entailed with critical-level utilitarian preferences and endogenous population size. First, we show that, under standard conditions concerning preferences and technology neither classical utilitarianism (CU) nor average utilitarianism (AU) can avoid a corner solution for the population growth rate, in that the former would prescribe that the population grows at the maximum speed (i.e. the so called "repugnant conclusion") while according to the latter such a growth rate should take the minimum value (AU). Critical level utilitarianism (CLU) does deliver an interior solution for the population growth rate provided that the critical level belongs to a positive, open interval. Second, we show that the transition to the steady state is nontrivial, in that, while consumption and capital move in the same direction, as in the standard Cass-Koopmans-Ramsey model, the optimal population growth rate and the time needed for reaching the steady state depend crucially on whether the steady state value of the optimal population growth rate is an interior or a corner solution. Finally, we perform comparative dynamics exercises on the steady state show that: a) A positive technological shock increases both capital and population growth rates, while reduces consumption; b) An increase of the critical level parameter increases consumption, leaves the capital intensity unchanged and decreases the population growth.

Abstract. The worldwide reforming process of pension systems triggered by the demographic transition and globalization has led several countries to implement multi-pillar pension systems and enhance pension funds. For this reason the studies on the effects that pension funds exert on markets performance have been flourishing in the last decades. In this paper, we provide an updated review of the empirical advances in this field of study, with particular focus on the effects that pension funds produce on labour markets, financial markets and economic growth.