Though the Hungarian pension system has been suffering from many erroneous rules, in the present paper we confine our attention to the rules of retirement in Hungary since 1990. In every pension system, there exist two rules which determine how the lifetime contribution (which is approximately...

Mandatory pension systems only partially replace old-age income, therefore the government also operates a voluntary pension system, where savings are matched by government grants. Accounting for the resulting tax expenditure, our models describe the income flow from shortsighted to farsighted...

In 2011, the Hungarian government introduced seniority pensions (Female40): females, who have been accumulating at least 40 years of eligibility (related to the length of contributions), can retire at any age without actuarial benefit reduction. The elimination of other early retirement scheme...

In his seminal model (Feldstein, 1985), the government operates a social security system to counter the representative worker's myopia. (i) For a complete myope, he determined a sizable optimal tax rate (and the corresponding benefit level). (ii) For a partially shortsighted worker, he...

Though never stated explicitly, there is a hidden hypothesis that in a normal pension system, the retirement age and the contribution length are strongly and positively correlated. We compare the time paths of male and female correlation coefficients in Austria, Hungary, Germany and Sweden for...

This paper surveys the most significant problems of the pension systems of EU11 countries. These nations had to transform their old-age social security systems after replacing a state-socialist economic order with a capitalist one. Stressing common as well as specific features, our paper...

The dependence of benefit on the retirement age (the schedule) is an important feature in any public pension system. The nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) pension system has recently become popular mainly because of its allegedly actuarial fairness. Using the framework of mechanism design...

In this paper, we analyze Hungarian pension policies between 1998 and 2017, comparing the pre- and post-2010 periods. Before 2010, Hungary was a liberal democracy dominated by populist economic policies. We call this the period of democratic populism. After 2010, with center-right but illiberal...

At the design of public pension systems, the designers frequently neglect that higher earners statistically live longer, and possibly also retire later. Since the first difference has recently been rising steeply, this negligence is less and less tolerable, especially with nonfinancial defined...

Due to various causes, the pension contribution rate can be reduced temporarily below its long-term value. We call a reduction forced if the balance of the public pension system is preserved through excessive wage-hikes and irritable relative devaluation of pensions in progress. A very simple...