Fertility has long been declining in industrialised countries and the existence of public pension systems is considered as one of the causes. This paper is the first to provide detailed evidence based on historical data on the mechanism by which a public pension system depresses fertility. Our...

The pandemic has highlighted significant gaps in social protection, in particularamong informal workers. With around 60% of workers in informal jobs, many of those most in need of social protection are left behind. The government has attempted to fill this gap with non-contributory benefits, but...

Norway will face a fast maturing old age pension scheme over the 30 next years whereas oil revenues will supply only a part of implicit liabilities related to the present generation. This working paper examines the recently proposed new measures to strengthen long term fiscal sustainability in...

Building on the existing literature that examines the extent of redistribution in the Social Security system as a whole, this paper focuses more specifically on how Social Security affects the poor. This question is important because a Social Security program that reduces overall inequality by...

Pension benefit rules depend on individual history far more than taxes do, and age plays a much larger role in pension determination than in tax determination. Apart from some simulation studies, theoretical studies of optimal tax design typically contain neither a mandatory pension system nor...

While the effect of social security systems on retirement decisions has received much attention, the impact of these systems on individuals incentives to invest in their human capital has not been analyzed. We integrate human capital investment and retirement decisions in a simple analytical...

There exists a wide variety of tax treatments of pensions across the world. And the reasons for such a range of regimes are not clear. This note reviews the general principles of pension taxes and analyses the theoretical foundations of why pension incomes ought to be taxed specifically. To do...

A reform of a pay-as-you-go social security makes the pensioners worse off and the working generations better off in the period of the reform (in a dynamically efficient economy without altruism). The observed reluctance across all age groups to support such reforms is usually explained by the...

Ýmrohoroðlu, Ýmrohoroðlu and Joines [1995, A life-cycle analysis of Social Security, Economic Theory, vol. 6, 83-114] show that the optimal replacement ratio of the payas-you-go public pension system in the US economy amounts to 30%. We extend their analysis to a model that 1) replicates the...

It is often argued that implicit taxation on continued activity of elderly workers is responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or of first-best efficiency, there would be no such implicit taxation. The point of this paper is that when...