Public pay-as-you-go pensions still form the dominant pillar of old-age provision in Germany. This is in marked contrast to the situation in Anglo-Saxon countries. It has advantages if labour markets are strong, e.g., following a quick recovery from the Great Recession. It has disadvantages, as...

We investigate the impact on pension take-up and labour supply of a broad Norwegian pension reform. Focussing on the long term impact, we use a structural discrete choice model estimated on data for first groups to become eligible for the new pension, accounting for the opportunity cost of...

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...

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...

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...

Analyses of pension funding effects on economic growth need to differentiate between "carve-out" pension privatization in Latin America and Eastern Europe and typical "add-on" pension funding in Western Europe and North America. We find no evidence that pension privatization in Latin America and...

This paper studies the impact of recent changes in second pension pillars of three Central and Eastern European Countries. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: i) what is the impact on the sustainability of Poland's pension system of the decrease in the pension contribution going...

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...

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...

We investigate the responsiveness of individual retirement decisions to changes in financial incentives. A reform increased women's normal retirement age (NRA) in two steps from age 62 to age 63 first and then to age 64. At the same time retirement at the previous NRA became possible at a...