Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

This paper studies how an increase in the minimum retirement age affects the labor market behavior of older workers. Between 2000 and 2006 the Austrian government gradually increased the early retirement age from 60 to 62.2 for men and from 55 to 57.2 for women. Using administrative data on the...

An opinion poll on a representative sample of Italian citizens suggests that it does. We focus on reforms that would lengthen retirement age and/or cut pension benefits. After controlling for individual features of the respondent, we find that individuals who are more informed about the costs...

Social insurance for the elderly is judged responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or in a first-best setting, there would be no such trend. However, when first-best instruments are not available, because health and productivity are not...

Major events in the life of an elderly individual, such as retirement, a significant decrease in income, death of the spouse, disability, and a move to a nursing home, may affect the mental health status of the individual. For example, the individual may enter a prolonged depression. We...

We use a unique dataset on individual retirement decisions in Swiss pension funds to analyze the choice between an annuity and a lump sum at retirement. Our analysis suggests the existence of an 'acquiescence bias', meaning that a majority of retirees chooses the standard option offered by the...

This Paper claims that technical progress induces early retirement of older workers. It supports this claim both theoretically and empirically. We present a model where part of human capital is technology-specific, so that technical progress erodes some existing human capital. This affects...

The present Paper studies the retirement incentives for elderly people in Belgium. We model the incentive structure built into the various public early retirement and retirement systems. First, we compute indicators of benefit entitlement such as the social security wealth. Then, we use three...

In the early 1990s, the Dutch social partners agreed upon transforming the generous and actuarially unfair PAYG early retirement schemes into less generous and actuarially fair capital funded schemes. The starting dates of the transitional arrangements varied by industry sector. In this study,...

This paper studies the design of pension schemes in a society where fertility is endogenous and parents differ in their ability to raise children. In a world with perfect information, a pay-as-you-go social security system is characterized by equal pensions for all but different contributions...