We study whether a better knowledge of the functioning of pay-as-you-go pension systems and recent demographic trends in the hosting country affects natives' attitudes towards immigration. In two online experiments in Italy and Spain, we randomly treated participants with a video explaining how,...

As evidence is accumulating that subjective expectations influence behavior and that these expectations are sometimes biased, it becomes policy-relevant to know how to influence individuals' expectations. Information in the media is likely to affect how people picture the future. This paper...

Recent pension reforms have shifted a larger responsibility towards savers. Individuals therefore need better knowledge of the rules and incentives embedded in the pension system to adequately save and prepare for retirement. In this paper, we use a novel Swedish survey matched with high-quality...

As evidence is accumulating that subjective expectations influence behavior and that these expectations are sometimes biased, it becomes policy-relevant to know how to influence individuals' expectations. Information in the media is likely to affect how people picture the future. This paper...

Government spending on the elderly is projected to increase rapidly as the American population becomes older. As a result, many policymakers and budget analysts are concerned about the continued viability of entitlement programs such as Social Security. The Social Security trustees' economic...

In this paper, the author deals with the question how to make PAYG pension systems financially resistant to fluctuating fertility rates. The author presents two pension schemes that lead to a permanently balanced budget but differ in the mixture of changes in the contribution rates and...

In this paper I study how PAYG pension systems of the notional defined contribution type can be designed such that they remain financially stable in the presence of increasing life expectancy. For this to happen two crucial parameters must be set in an appropriate way. First, the remaining life...

In this paper I study the impact of increasing longevity on pay-as-you-go pension systems. First, I show that increasing longevity increases their internal rate of return. The size of the effect di ers for di erent policy regimes. It is higher for the case where the retirement age is increased...

The paper studies how the rates of deduction for early retirement have to be determined in PAYG systems in order to keep their budget stable. I show that the budget-neutral deductions depend on the speci_c rules of the pension system and on the choice of the discount rate which itself depends on...