Several studies have documented a strong correlation in the timing of spouses’ retirement decisions. However, considerably less is known about the causal impact of one spouse’s retirement incentives on the retirement decision of the other spouse. Before, but not after, 2001 broad categories...

Many Western countries with an aging population consider reforms of their pay-as-you-go pension systems. In Sweden a new pension system has already been decided and implemented. This paper gives a brief background to the Swedish reforms in the 1990s and explains the structure of the new system.

Knowledge about how elderly workers react to changes in pension benefits is important in guiding the design of social security systems. This paper contributes to this knowledge by examining the effect of changed replacement rates on part-time retirement behaviour in Sweden. During the 1980s,...

The Swedish pension reform of 1999-2003 provides an opportunity to study whether and how important economic incentives are for the timing of retirement. The new pension system provides a much closer link between contributions and benefits than the former system. I study whether the reform has...

In this paper, we consider how the retirement age as well as a tax financed pension system ought to respond to a change in the standard deviation of the length of life. In a first best framework, where a benevolent government exercises perfect control over the individuals’ labor supply and...

This report provides an extensive overview of the history of the Swedish pension system. Starting with the implementation of the world's first universal public pension system in 1913, the report discusses the political as well as the economic background to each major public pension reform up...

This paper uses unique micro data from a Swedish occupational pension plan to study the determinants of annuitization. The data is merged with national administrative data to create a large data set with rich individual background characteristics. The pension can either be withdrawn as a life...

This study investigates the general equilibrium effects of a fertility shock under different intergenerational transfer schemes. The effects on lifetime income and utility for different generations, as well as the effects on factor prices, are analyzed in a three-period overlapping generations...

There is a rich literature analyzing the problems that will arise as the share of elderly and retired in the population increases in the near future. However, the locational decisions among the elderly as well as their implications in terms of taxes/transfers and of allocation of...

The paper examines whether a worker's sick absence behaviour influences the risk of becoming unemployed. Swedish panel data are used to estimate the relationship between the incidence and duration of sick leave and subsequent unemployment. The results indicate that an increase in the number of...