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...

Employers and job seekers rely extensively on job informational networks to fill vacancies or to find a job. The widespread use of job contacts to find work has been largely associated with labor outcomes, such as finding a job or even affecting wages. Some scholars have claimed that informal...

This paper re-examines the effects of population aging and pension reforms in an OLG model with labor market frictions. The most important feature brought about by labor market frictions is the connection between the interest rate and the unemployment rate. Exogenous shocks (such as aging)...

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...

In this paper, we examine the consequences of delaying retirement in an overlapping generations model with domestic production and parental transfers in the form of grandchild care. We show that a change in age at retirement influences the employment rates of both young and the old. This...

Dans un modèle à générations imbriquées avec production «à la Diamond», on introduit de l’incertitude sur la durée de vie. En comparaison la dynamique d’une économie sans système de retraite avec celle d’une économie disposant d’un système de retraite par capitalisation, on...

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...

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...