We set up an overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility to study pensions policies in an ageing economy. We show that an increasing life expectancy may not be detrimental for the economy or the pension system itself. On the other hand, conventional policy measures, such as...

This chapter defines a universal public pension scheme (UPPS) as a government-mandated lifecycle longevity insurance scheme that transfers individual consumption from the working years to the retirement phase of the lifecycle. It discusses the differences in four UPPS designs defined with regard...

This paper shows the effects on a pay-as-you-go pension system of the demographic change in the standard overlapping generations model. Firstly, we consider a setting with exogenous fertility and then a model with endogenous fertility. In both cases, population ageing due to increased longevity...

The introduction of NDC public pension scheme in few European countries, such as Latvia, Sweden, Italy, and Poland, in the nineties was motivated, among other things, by the need (i) to ensure the long term financial sustainability of the public pension system by linking pension returns to...

Subjective expectations about future policy play an important role in individuals' welfare. We examine how workers' expectations about pension reform vary with proximity to reforms, information cost, and aggregate information acquisition. We construct a new pan-European dataset of reform...

Old-age pensions in the NDC systems reflect the accumulated lifetime labour income. Interrupted careers and differences in the employment rates, particularly between men and women will have a significant impact on pension incomes in NDC countries. In the paper, we compare the labour market...

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...

The paper traces labor market reforms over the last four decades. It provides estimates of retirement incentives for a selected set of typical worker profiles across time and socio-economic groups and links these series to the labor market performance in Belgium. The results show that the...

In January 2006, the Dutch government implemented a pension reform that substantially reduced the public pension wealth of workers born in 1950 or later. At the same time, a tax-facilitated savings plan was introduced that substantially reduced the saving costs of all workers, irrespective of...

This paper demonstrates that the link between heterogeneity in longevity and lifetime income across countries is mostly high and often increasing; that it translates into an implicit tax/subsidy, with rates reaching 20 percent and higher in some countries; that such rates risk perverting...