Pensions and Insider-Outsider Unemployment

If workers gain an insider position through past activity, young workers will bear the resulting outsider unemployment burden. In a world where productivity of employed workers rises because of learning-by-doing, and where labor demand is sufficiently elastic, preventing this unemployment (by lowering wages) leads to a higher income tax base in the future. Thus the institution of certain intergenerational transfer schemes provides an incentive for insiders to lower wages. In a stylized overlapping-generations model I show that this effect partially or fully abolishes unemployment in the steady-state equilibria.