We compare a social security system where people can retire at an age of their own choice with one in which there is a legal retirement age elected through a majority voting process. We show that individuals prefer a legal retirement age higher than the one they would choose in the flexible...

The paper aims to assess tax-favored retirement accounts in a general-equilibrium overlapping-generations economy with idiosyncratic income risk and borrowing constraints. Our simulations indicate that tax-favored retirement accounts as implemented in many OECD countries will have a significant...

This paper extends the Diamond overlapping-generations model with pay-as-you-go social security by allowing for variable retirement age and for distortionary taxation of earnings and interest income. The tax rates are shown to depend on whether or not debt policy is available, and on the...

This paper studies human-capital formation, labor-supply, and retirement decisions associated with four alternative regimes of social security. We implement a theoretical model with overlapping generations of households and two different ability types within each generation. We find that with a...

Generational Accounting is only a shortcut to a general equilibrium analysis because it is assumed that individual decisions are unaffected by policy reforms. Nonetheless only two studies examine the accuracy of Generational Accounting, but Fehr and Kotlikoff (1996) consider changes in...

The paper examines the long-term implications of various reform options for retirement entry decisions and the actual retirement age of older workers. It focuses on the changes in pension legislation since 1992 and the reform options discussed by the German Social Security Reform Commission...

Adopting a portfolio choice approach to pension design, we derive illuminating closed form solutions for optimal pay-as-you-go social security programs. We demonstrate that the nature of the implied risk-sharing effects and their magnitudes are sensitive to the stochastic specification of...

We propose an extended pay-as-you-go social security system that conditions pension benefits on the aggregate wage sum and on the wage of one's children. The latter increases parents' incentives to provide their children with good within-family education. However, since wages depend...

Individuals in most all countries face a wide range of direct taxes on their income, especially variants of the individual income tax and payroll taxes. For the income tax, attempts are often made to reduce the compliance and administrative costs of the tax by using presumptive, or simplified,...

This paper develops an overlapping-generations model characterized by endogenous growth, unemployment, and pollution. The paper focuses on the replacement ratio, which measures the proportion of after-tax work earnings replaced by unemployment benefits, and considers a replacement-ratio-neutral...