This paper provides a unified treatment of externalities associated with fertility and human capital accumulation as they relate to pension systems. It considers as overlapping generations model in which every generation consists of high earners and low earners with the proportion of types being...

In this paper, we consider how the retirement age as well as a tax financed pension system ought to respond to a change in the standard deviation of the length of life. In a first best framework, where a benevolent government exercises perfect control over the individuals' labor supply and...

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...

Using an OLG model with skill uncertainty and private savings, we investigate whether an optimally designed set of public pension transfers can usefully supplement a nonlinear labor income tax as a welfare-enhancing policy instrument. We consider a Mirrleesian setting where agents' skills are...

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...

In this paper, we consider how the hours of work and retirement age ought to respond to a change in the uncertainty of the length of life. In a first best framework, where a benevolent government exercises perfect control over the individuals' labor supply and retirement-decisions, the results...

We study the design of pension benefits for male and female workers. Women live longer than men but have a lower wage. Individuals can be single or live in couples who pool their incomes. Social welfare is utilitarian but an increasing concave transformation of individuals' lifetime utilities...

Estimated labor supply functions are important tools when designing an optimal income tax or calculating the effect of tax reforms. It is therefore of large importance to use estimation methods that give reliable results and to know their properties. In this paper Monte Carlo simulations are...

We consider a two-period overlapping generations model in which individual voters differ by age and by productivity. In such a setting, a redistributive Pay-As-You-Go system is politically sustainable, even when the interest rate is larger than the rate of population growth. The workers with...

We study the role and design of private and public insurance programs when informal care is uncertain. Children's degree of altruism is randomly distributed over some interval. Social insurance helps parents who receive a low level of care, but it comes at the cost of crowding out informal care....