Recent reforms that aim at reducing the upcoming burdens of population aging might seriously harm low income individuals. An increase in old-age poverty and disability will be the result. Under this prospect, the present paper quantitatively characterizes the optimal progressivity of unfunded...

In the real world, public pay-as-you-go pension (PAYG) schemes are popular and co-exist with private, retirement-saving schemes. This is true even in dynamically efficient economies where such pensions offer a lower return. The classic Aaron-Samuelson result argues that, in theory, this is...

In this paper, we propose a novel index for measuring intra-generational redistribution in pay-as-you-go pension schemes. Our index solely requires information on contributions and pension benefits of retirees, enabling us to measure intra-generational redistribution isolated from possible...

We analyze the political stability of capital funded social security. In particular, using a stylized theoretical framework we study the mechanisms behind governments capturing pension assets in order to lower current taxes. This is followed by an analysis of the analogous mechanisms in a...

Pensions may be provided for in a modern society by a mix of several methods, namely by voluntary individual savings, mandatory fully-funded occupational pension systems, mandatory social security financed by pay-as-you-go, and old-fashioned hoarding in cash. Here, we call the specific mixture...

Within a politico-economic model we first establish three hypotheses: (i) Retirees generally prefer a higher retirement age than workers, whereby just retired individuals prefer the highest retirement age, (ii) in equilibrium the level of the legal retirement age is increasing in longevity and...

The Dutch pension system is internationally top-ranked as a well-designed three-pillar system. Moreover, almost all forms of pension benefits are expenditure taxed in line with the European Commission's recommendations. Consequently, the Dutch pension policy approach could be regarded as a...

This paper documents and analyzes an important and puzzling stylized fact about retirement behavior: the large concentration of job exits at specific ages. In Germany, almost 30% of workers retire precisely in the month when they reach one of three statutory retirement ages, although there is...

Subjective expectations about future policy play an important role in individuals' welfare. We examine how workers' expectations about pension reform vary with proximity to reforms, information cost, and aggregate information acquisition. We construct a new pan-European dataset of reform...

The goal of this research is to explore whether actual lottery revenues are sensitive to scarcity, as measured by intra-monthly variation in financial resources. Exogenous paydays of social security benefits are employed to generate the intra-monthly variation in financial resources. Using two...