Recent debates of basic income (BI) proposals shine a useful spotlight on the challenges that traditional forms of income support are increasingly facing, and highlight gaps in social provisions that largely depend on income or employment status. A universal "no questions asked" public transfer...

Given the prevalence of informal labor, most countries have combined contributory social insurance programs (pensions, unemployment benefits, and health insurance), with non-contributory insurance programs and several types of "safety nets." All of these programs involve different types of...

Redistribution across individuals in a one-year-period framework is an empirically intensely studied question. However, a substantial share of annual redistribution might turn out to serve individual insurance in a longer perspective, reducing the level of actual redistribution across...

We study the welfare effects of disability insurance (DI) and derive social-optimality conditions for the two main DI policy parameters: (i) DI eligibility rules and (ii) DI benefits. Causal evidence from two DI reforms in Austria generate fiscal multipliers (total over mechanical cost...

This paper uses a randomized information intervention to shed light on whether poor understanding of social insurance, both the process of enrolling and costs and benefits, drives the relatively low rates of participation in urban health insurance and pension programs among China's rural-urban...

Most countries reduce Disability Insurance (DI) benefits for beneficiaries earning above a specified threshold. Such an earnings threshold generates a discontinuous increase in tax liability – a notch – and creates an incentive to keep earnings below the threshold. Exploiting such a notch in...

We analyze expectations of the Dutch population of ages 25 and older concerning the future generosity state and occupational pensions, the two main pillars of the Dutch pension system. Since the summer of 2006, monthly survey data were collected on the expectations of Dutch households concerning...

This paper provides a clear and transparent setting to study the effect of additional pension benefits on women's retirement decision. Using administrative pension insurance records from Germany, I examine the impact of a pension subsidy program to low pay workers, implemented in 1992. The...

I estimate the effect of additional pension benefits on women's retirement decisions by examining a German pension subsidy program for low-pay workers. The subsidies have a kinked relationship with the recipients' past contributions, creating a sharply different slope of benefits for similar...

In this paper, we analyse the effects of demographic change on a PAYG pension system, financed with a defined contribution scheme. In particular we examine the relationship between retirement, fertility and pensions in a three-period overlapping generations model. We focus on both the case of...