Aging populations in developing countries have spurred the introduction of public pension programs to preserve the standard of living for the elderly. The often-overlooked mechanism of intergenerational transfers, however, can dampen these intended policy effects, as adult children who make...

Intergenerational risk sharing by funded pension schemes may increase welfare in an ex ante sense. However, it also suffers from a time inconsistency problem. In particular, young generations may be unwilling to start participating in a pension scheme if this requires them to make huge transfers...

Economists have mainly focused on human capital accumulation and considerably less on the causes and consequences of human capital depreciation in late adulthood. Studying human capital depreciation over the life cycle has powerful economic consequences for decision-making in old age. Using data...

The Post-9/11 GI Bill allows service members to transfer generous education benefits to a dependent. We run a large-scale experiment to test whether active choice framing impacts US Army service members' decision to transfer benefits. Individuals who received email messages framing GI Bill use...

In many countries, collective funded pension schemes with defined benefits (DB) are being replaced by individual schemes with defined contributions. Collective funded DB pensions may indeed reduce social welfare. This will be the case when the schemes feature income-related contributions that...

This paper addresses two policy questions with respect to public defined benefit (DB) pension schemes: Firstly, does a funded DB pension scheme increase welfare? In other words: do the gains from intergenerational sharing of capital market risks outweigh the labour market distortions from...