Population aging and pension reform will have profound effects on international capital markets. First, demographic change alters the time path of aggregate savings within each country. Second, this process may be amplified when a pension reform shifts old-age provision towards more pre-funding....

In the nineties, the number of currency crises has been high, both in the industrial world and among emerging countries. An important characteristic of many of these crises is that they started in one country but very soon affected others as well. Currency crises seemed to be contagious. In this...

We construct a new-Keynesian DSGE model tailored to the Netherlands and interpret it as a multivariate unobserved components model. We identify three major stochastic trends in the data—trends in general-purpose technology, investment-specific technology, and labor supply—and model them...

A generalisation of Gompertz' distribution is proposed, and it is shown that continuous heterogeneous mortality models with Gamma distributed frailty have lifetime random variables distributed as the difference of two such generalised Gompertz random variables. With this result, limitations of...

In the policy debate on increasing the statutory retirement age, the issue has been raised to make an exception for workers with demanding occupations, since health considerations may make it unreasonable to expect them to work longer. We use unique Dutch survey data to analyze the general...

In the domain of pension statistics comparability of pension entitlements across countries improved substantially due to new SNA/ESA recommendations. In the near future, inclusion of unfunded employment related pension schemes in the core accounts or in the supplementary table on pensions will...

Around the world today there are striking differences in pension systems. The roles played by families, employers, trade unions, financial intermediaries, community organizations, affiliation groups, and governmental agencies vary tremendously. Yet despite these differences, in almost every...

Theory predicts a number of mechanisms through which survival expectations influence retirement decisions: a wealth effect of a longer lifespan; an uncertainty effect through the return on savings; a longevity risk effect; and, an adverse selection effect from pooling within pensions. We use...

Early retirement is predominantly considered as the result of incentives set by social security and the tax system. But people seem to retire early even in the absence of such distortions as the Swiss example demonstrates. We look for determinants of early retirement, in particular the role of...

This paper reports on the findings of a survey among Dutch households (as part of the DNB Household Survey in 2003) about many aspects (expectations, concerns, attitude and preferences) of their pensions and the old-age-arrangements in the Netherlands. We explore whether the outcomes are related...