The Croatian system of old-age provision comprises a traditional public pay-as-you-go scheme and a mandatory funded scheme ("second pillar") that will provide increasing amounts of supplementary pensions to those entering retirement in the future. Due to the continuing economic crisis, the...

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...

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...

Pensions and age specific death rates are intertwined in several ways. Pensions provide a mechanism to remove the uncertainty about date of death from consumption planning. Age specific death rates determine the cost and value of pensions. In this paper, we use the Retirement History Survey to...

In traditional societies it is often argued that parents' desire for old age security in the form of transfers from their children provides an important motive for childbearing. Some doubt has been cast on this "old age security hypothesis" by recent estimates which suggest that the rate of...

This paper investigates how increases in the level of maximum earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax have affected Social Security benefits and taxes. The analysis uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to ask how different the present value of own benefits and taxes would...

In theory, improvements in healthy life expectancy should generate increases in the average age of retirement, with little effect on savings rates. In many countries, however, retirement incentives in social security programs prevent retirement ages from keeping pace with changes in life...

Population aging is primarily the result of past declines in fertility, which produced a decades long period in which the ratio of dependents to working age adults was reduced. Rising old-age dependency in many countries represents the inevitable passing of this "demographic dividend." Societies...

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...