Even with well-developed capital markets, there is no private market mechanism for trading between current and future generations, so a potential role for public old-age pension systems is to spread economic and demographic shocks among different generations. This paper evaluates the smoothing...

The extent of the demographic changes in Europe is dramatic and will deeply affect future labor, financial and goods markets. The expected strain on public budgets and especially social security has already received prominent attention, but aging poses many other economic challenges that...

This paper studies the business-cycle variation in higher-order (labor) income risk--that is, risks that are captured by moments higher than the variance. We examine the extent to which such risks can be smoothed within households or with government social insurance and tax policies. We use...

This paper describes the German public old age social security program (,Gesetzliche Rentenversicherung') and its incentive effects on retirement decisions. The paper presents the key features of the system and expresses retirement incentives in the form of accrual rates of social security...

We examine the link between equity risk premiums and demographic changes using a very long sample over the twentieth century for the US, Japan, UK, Germany and France, and a shorter sample covering the last third of the twentieth century for fifteen countries. We find that demographic variables...

Incentive effects of pension systems are usually estimated under the assumption that the institutional environment provides a single optimal 'pathway' for retirement. However, many countries provide competing pathways which may include several early retirement options in addition to normal...

Little is known about the fiscal costs of natural disasters, especially regarding social safety nets that do not specifically target extreme weather events. This paper shows that US hurricanes lead to substantial increases in non-disaster government transfers, such as unemployment insurance and...

In this paper we compute the optimal tax and education policy transition in an economy where progressive taxes provide social insurance against idiosyncratic wage risk, but distort the education decision of households. Optimally chosen tertiary education subsidies mitigate these distortions. We...