Pensions may be provided for in a modern society by a mix of several methods, namely by voluntary individual savings, mandatory fully-funded occupational pension systems, mandatory social security financed by pay-as-you-go, and old-fashioned hoarding in cash. Here, we call the specific mixture...

We study the impact of a fully-funded social security system in an economy with heterogeneous consumers. The unobservability of individual health conditions leads to adverse selection in the private annuity market. Introducing social security—which is immune to adverse selection—affects...

This paper examines a small random liquidity shock to reveal the effect of liquidity constraints on late payment behavior. In Jerusalem, water bill due dates are randomly determined and therefore may occur just before or after social security paydays. We compared the likelihood of late payments...

We provide new evidence of forward-looking labor supply responses to changes in pension wealth. We exploit a 2014 German reform that increased pension wealth for mothers by an average of 4.4% per child born before January 1, 1992. Using administrative data on the universe of working histories,...

Early retirement is usually explained as a supply-side phenomenon. However, early retirement can also be a demand-side phenomenon arising from a firm's profit maximization behavior. This paper analyzes voluntary and involuntary early retirement based on international microdata covering 19...

There is a well-known gender difference in time allocation within the household, which has important implications for gender differences in labor market outcomes. We ask how malleable this gender difference in time allocation is to culture. In particular, we ask if US immigrants allocate tasks...

We provide the first systematic account of summer declines in women’s labor market activity. From May to July, the employment-to-population ratio among prime-age US women declines by 1.1 percentage points, whereas male employment rises; women’s total hours worked fall by 11 percent, twice...

This article, based on two books (2008, forthcoming), sets out principles for pension design: pension systems have multiple objectives, analysis should consider the pension system as a whole, analysis should be in a second-best context, different systems share risks differently and have...

This paper considers the quantitative role of growth in the size of the social security program in contributing to the collapse of personal saving in the U.S. over the last few decades. Using a calibrated, general equilibrium life-cycle model this paper shows that social security may not be to...