This paper integrates into public economics a biologically founded, stochastic process of individual ageing. The novel approach enables us to investigate the interaction between health and retirement policy in order to quantitatively characterize the optimal joint design of the social insurance...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of the Italian social security system in an economy with uncertainty on wages, financial market returns and life expectancy. The introduction of a pension system reproducing the Italian statutory scheme turns out to decrease ex-ante individual welfare,...

We provide new evidence of forward-looking labor supply responses to changes in pension wealth. We exploit a 2014 German reform that increased pension wealth for mothers by an average of 4.4% per child born before January 1, 1992. Using administrative data on the universe of working histories,...

Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security schemes in the OECD countries are facing solvency problems, as people are living longer and birth rates have declined. Postponing the full retirement age (FRA), when retirees are entitled to full pension, has been proposed as a solution. This effectively...

In most OECD countries, pension reform policy has decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution over the last three decades, that is, redistribution among members of the same generation with high and low pension entitlements. This trend has occurred despite heterogeneity in life...

Recently, mandatory pension contributions in the private sector in Iceland were increased substantially while remaining unchanged in the public sector. This constituted a large natural experiment. We study the effects of this experiment on households’ voluntary saving using administrative...

We study the influence of family members, neighbors and coworkers on retirement behavior. To estimate causal retirement spillovers between individuals, we exploit a pension reform in the Netherlands that creates exogenous variation in peers' retirement ages, and we use administrative data on the...

This paper analyzes behavioral responses to a 2014 reform in the German public pension system that lowered the full retirement age (FRA) of individuals with a long contribution history by up to two years and framed the new FRA as reference age for retirement. Using administrative data from...

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...