This paper studies retirement and child support policies in a small, open, overlapping-generations economy with PAYG social security and endogenous retirement and fertility decisions. It demonstrates that neither fertility nor retirement choices necessarily coincide with socially optimal...

We study the interactions between capital income tax and social security privatization in the context of rising longevity. In an economy with idiosyncratic income shocks, redistributive defined benefit social security provides some insurance against income uncertainty. This insurance comes at...

The paper evaluates the distributional effects on earnings and income of requiring young welfare recipients to fulfill conditions related to work and activation. It exploits within-social insurance office variation in policy arising from a geographically staggered reform in Norway. The reform...

This paper provides a clear and transparent setting to study the effect of additional pension benefits on women's retirement decision. Using administrative pension insurance records from Germany, I examine the impact of a pension subsidy program to low pay workers, implemented in 1992. The...

We analyze the political stability of funded social security. Using a stylized theoretical framework we study the mechanisms behind governments capturing social security assets in order to lower current taxes. The results and the driving mechanisms carry over to a fully-fledged and carefully...

We study the effects of public pension systems on the retirement timing of older workers and, in turn, the health consequences of delaying retirement by those workers. Causal inference relies on a social security reform in Israel that shifted payments from husbands to their (non-working) wives,...

We exploit a unique Swiss reform to identify the importance of passivity, claiming social security benefits at the Full Retirement Age (FRA). Sharp discontinuities generated by the reform reveal that raising the FRA while imposing small early claiming penalties significantly delays pension...

While optimization frictions have been shown to attenuate earnings responses to financial incentives, less is understood about the individual factors shaping the response. The main contribution of this paper is to separately quantify the role of learning the tax and benefit schedule versus other...

Discrimination in formal labor markets can push discriminated groups into labor informality, where wages are lower and pensions scarce. In this paper, we explore whether education offsets discrimination by empowering discriminated groups to successfully compete for formal jobs. Specifically, we...

Many defined-benefit pension systems in developed and developing countries use a small set of final years of earnings to compute pension benefits. This provides dynamic incentives to report higher earnings in the final years of the career. In this paper, we document the responses of...