Generous early retirement provisions account for a large proportion of the drop in the labour force participation of elderly workers. The aim of this paper is to provide a political-economic explanation of the wide spread adoption of early retirement. We suggest that the political support for...

Why does the largest US welfare programme select its recipients by their age, rather than by their earnings or wealth? In a dynamic efficient overlapping generation economy with earnings heterogeneity, we analyze a welfare system composed of a within-cohort redistribution scheme and an unfunded...

Social Security programmes around the world link public pensions to retirement: people do not lose their pensions if they make a million dollars a year in the stock market, but they do confront marginal tax rates of up to 100% if they choose to work. After arguing that most existing theories...

Is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies? In this paper we propose and analyze a particular market failure that may lead to inefficiently low equilibrium fertility and therefore to a need for government intervention. The friction we investigate is related to the ownership of...

It is argued that a PAYGO system may have useful allocative functions in that it serves as an insurance against not having children and as an enforcement device for 'rotten kids' who are unwilling to pay their parents a pension. It is true that the system has a moral hazard effect in terms of...

The European ageing process will lead to a dramatic rise in dependency ratios over the next decades. At the same time labour mobility will increase as a result of greater European economic integration. We analyse the implications of migration and ageing for European social security systems. With...

The present Paper studies the retirement incentives for elderly people in Belgium. We model the incentive structure built into the various public early retirement and retirement systems. First, we compute indicators of benefit entitlement such as the social security wealth. Then, we use three...

This study investigates the determinants of applications for US disability benefits between 1986 and 1993 using a semiparametric discrete factor procedure. Approximating a dynamic optimization model, the estimation carefully accounts for a variety of potential biases that weren’t addressed in...