Recent reforms that aim at reducing the upcoming burdens of population ageing might seriously harm low income individuals. An increase in old-age poverty and disability will be the result. Under this prospect, the present paper quantitatively characterizes the optimal progressivity of unfunded...

The present paper aims to quantify efficiency properties of real world social security systems of various institutional designs in order to identify an optimal pension design. Starting from a benchmark economy without social security, we introduce alternative pension systems and compare the...

In 2007 Germany has introduced a pension reform which increases the normal retirement age from currently age 65 to 67. The present study aims to quantify the macroeconomic, welfare and efficiency consequences of this reform by means of a computable general equilibrium model with overlapping...

We construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations in order to analyze the optimality of means-testing pension benefits in the UK. While previous studies only consider the long-run welfare effects of alternative policy reforms, we compute the full transition...

The present paper studies the growth and efficiency consequences of pension funding with individual retirement accounts in a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic lifespan and labor income uncertainty. We distinguish between economies with rational and hyperbolic...

The present paper studies the growth, welfare and efficiency consequences of tax-favored retirement accounts in a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic lifespan and labor income uncertainty. We focus on the implicit differential taxation of savings motives and the...