In several OECD countries, public pay-as-you-go financed pension systems have undergone major reforms in which future retirement benefit promises have been scaled down. A consequence of these reforms is that especially in countries with a tight tax-benefit linkage, the retirement benefit claims...

Population aging will be a major determinant of long-run economic development in industrial and developing countries. The extent of the demographic changes is dramatic in some countries and will deeply affect future labor, financial and goods markets. The expected strain on public budgets and...

The empirical relationship between income and longevity has been addressed by a large number of studies, but most were confined to men. In particular, administrative data from public pension systems are less reliable for women because of the loose relationship between own earnings and household...

In a recent paper, Homburg and Richter have argued that with free mobility of labor within a common labor market there is a need to harmonize and even consolidate pay-as-you-go financed national public pension systems to reach an efficient allocation of labor. We show that with free and...

As one possible solution to the well-known financing crisis of unfunded social security systems, an increase in the retirement age is a popular option. To induce workers to retire later, it has been proposed to strengthen the link between retirement age and benefit level. The present paper is...

In this paper we identify a number of objectionable features of the German retirement benefit formula. We show that groups of insureds with higher than average life expectancy, in particular high-income groups, are subsidized by the rest of the membership because the formula neglects differences...

It is now a commonplace that the unfunded public pension systems of many OECD countries will run into severe financing problems in the coming decades due to a dramatically increasing pensioner/worker ratio. While this diagnosis is completely undisputed, there is still a vigorous debate on the...

Building on the existing literature that examines the extent of redistribution in the Social Security system as a whole, this paper focuses more specifically on how Social Security affects the poor. This question is important because a Social Security program that reduces overall inequality by...

Declining fertility and increasing longevity have rendered public pension systems in many OECD countries unsustainable and have triggered substantial reforms of these systems. One of the officially declared reform objectives is to raise the average retirement age. Crucial parameters for this...