On the basis of a longitudinal administrative dataset (1991-2002) merged with the Census of 2001 and the National Register, the majority of the poor elderly in Belgium appear to be persistently poor. The question arises why this might be so. To the extent that individual characteristics such as...

In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....

Les travailleurs bénéficient de performances différentes sur le marché du travail en fonction de leur âge : le taux d'emploi exhibe une trajectoire en cloche en fonction de l'âge, tandis que le taux de chômage est continuellement décroissant. Au cours des dernières décennies, le taux...

Are employers willing to employ more older individuals, in particular older women? Higher employment among the older segments of the population will only materialise if firms are willing to employ them. Although several economists have started considering the demand side of the labour market for...

In December 2005, the Belgian government adopted the law on the Intergenerational Solidarity Pact (ISP) with the objective to increase the employment rate of the elderly. In order to meet that objective, several active ageing policies and reforms were taken. The aim of this paper is to...

A transition from pay-as-you-go pension systems to more private funded systems is often suggested as a solution to finance pension systems threatened by ageing. This paper analyses alternative potential remedies linked to changes in labour market characteristics, within an international...

The effects of three reforms of the Belgian old-age pension system were examined on retirement behaviour, government budget and income distribution of the old-age retired. On the basis of a large administrative micro-dataset used to estimate and simulate a discrete-time hazard model we found...

Early retirement is often explained as resulting from a voluntary labour supply choice of a utility maximizing individual. nonetheless, a lof of individuals perceive retirement as a forced instead as a voluntary decision. This paper tries to accomodate voluntary and unvoluntary labour supply...

Many EU countries are confronted with low employment rates, particularly among elderly workers. At the same time, levels of human capital are on the rise. Should this lift the age of retirement and lead to higher lifetime employment rates ? In order to explore these issues, we develop a simple...

In order to study the macroeconomic effects of public finances, we construct a computable general equilibrium model with overlapping generations, endogenous growth and endogenous retirement age. We calibrate this model on Belgian data. We show that it is able to replicate the observed increase...