Over the next four decades, increasing old-age dependency ratios exert an enormous upward pressure on welfare spending in most developed countries. As this is mainly due to existing unfunded public pension schemes, many countries have embarked on far-reaching reforms in this area, strengthening...

Pension systems have recently been under scrutiny because of the expected population ageing threatening its sustainability. This paper’s contribution to the debate is from a political economic perspective as it uses data from a Choice Experiment to investigate individual preferences for an...

This paper explores the introduction of collective risk-sharing elements in defined contribution pension contracts. We consider status-contingent, age-contingent and asset contingent risk-sharing arrangements. All arrangements raise aggregate welfare, as measured by equivalent variations. While...

This paper studies the impact of recent changes in second pension pillars of three Central and Eastern European Countries on the deficit and implicit debt of their full pension systems. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: what is the impact on the sustainability of Poland's...

In this paper, we investigate two fiscal policy options to mitigate fiscal pressure arising from ageing of the Australian population: pension cuts or tax hikes. Using a computable overlapping generations model, we find that while both policy options achieve the same fiscal goal, the...

The paper analyses the impact of demographic developments on the German pension system until the year 2060. The projections are simulated for a range of assumptions on the latest demographic trends and on the labour market and comprise the latest pension legislation. As a central innovation we...

This paper analyzes a fully funded social security system under the assumption that agents face temptation issues. Agents are required to save through individually managed Personal Security Accounts without, and with mandatory annuitization. When the analysis is restricted to CRRA preferences...

For policy reforms to increase a society's welfare, reliable information on people's prefer-ences and expectations is crucial. Representative opinion polls, often involving simplified questions about the complex topics under debate, are an important source of information for both policy-makers...

We explore the benefits of intergenerational risk-sharing through both private funded pensions and via the public debt. We use a multi-period overlapping generations model with a PAYG pension pillar, a funded pension pillar and a government. Shocks are smoothed via the public debt and variations...

To evaluate pension reforms in public services, we put forward a simple criterion, the actuarial cost of a worker, per year of service. This measure of cost is the expected, discounted sum of net real wages and pension benefits, earned by a worker over his entire life cycle, divided by the...