Abstract: Analyzing 30 OECD-countries in 1980-2005, this paper documents the effect of an aging electorate on pension expenditure. The first outcome is that an increase in the age of the median voter leads to less generous pension benefits. The second outcome is that an older median voter is not...

Pensioners have increasingly more control over their income streams as a result of<br/>pension reforms, which gives them more freedom to save for their old age. We devise an experiment where subjects face a life-cycle optimization task with lifetime uncertainty and a given lifetime income. The aims...

Abstract Unemployment insurance recipients in the Netherlands were for a long time exempted from the requirement to actively search for a job when they reached the age of 57.5. We study how this exemption affected the job finding rates of the recipients involved. We find evidence that the job...

In this paper it is empirically investigated whether feelings of altruism towards members of other generations and senses of justice have an impact on the individual s evaluation of the public pension system. The data have been obtained from a large-scale survey carried out among a...

This paper investigates how a mandatory activation program in Denmark affects the job finding rate of unemployed workers.The activation program was introduced in an experimental setting where about half of the workers who became unemployed in the period from November 2005 to March 2006 were...

This paper analyses the effects of reducing unfunded social security in a closed economy that consists of a service sector and a commodity sector.It is shown that if old agents mainly demand labour intensive services, a modest decrease of the pay-as-you-go pension scheme still raises long-run...

We study how changes in the maximum benefit duration affec the inow into unemployment in the Netherlands. Until August 2003, workers who became un- employed after age 57.5 were entitled to unemployment benefits until the age of 65, after which they would receive old age pensions. This...