We provide a long-term perspective on the individual retirement behaviour and on the future of early retirement. In a cross-country sample, we find that total pension spending depends positively on the degree of early retirement and on the share of elderly in the population, which increase the...

Generous early retirement provisions account for a large proportion of the drop in the labour force participation of elderly workers. The aim of this paper is to provide a political-economic explanation of the wide spread adoption of early retirement. We suggest that the political support for...

The dramatic rise in the US social security and public health expenditure is only partially explained by the demographic trend. We suggest that the political complementarity between these two programmes induced a multiplicative response to the ageing process. Public health care increases the...

Why does the largest US welfare programme select its recipients by their age, rather than by their earnings or wealth? In a dynamic efficient overlapping generation economy with earnings heterogeneity, we analyze a welfare system composed of a within-cohort redistribution scheme and an unfunded...

Generous early retirement provisions account for a large proportion of the drop in the labor force participation of elderly workers. The aim of this paper is to provide a positive theory of early retirement. We suggest that the political support for generous early retirement provisions relies...

Early retirement represents a policy response to the appearance of a mass of redundant middle-aged workers, who were not entitled to a pension transfer in their old age. This policy is distortionary, since it reduces the incentive to accumulate human capital, hence decreasing economic growth: it...

Conventional economic wisdom suggests because of the aging process, social security systems will have to be retrenched. In particular, retirement age will have to be largely increased. Yet, is this policy measure feasible in OECD countries? Since the answer belongs mainly to the realm of...

This paper provides a direct test of the causal link from electoral rules to economic policy. Our theoretical model delivers unambigous predictions on the interaction between institutions and a time varying event, namely the unemployment rate in pivotal and non-pivotal districts. We use local...

The emergence of old-age social security has been linked to general fertility decline, and in recent years pension reforms have emerged as a response to the challenges of population ageing, in turn partially a consequence of fertility decline. Understanding the link between social security and...

We study how family culture affected the initial welfare state design. Our theoretical framework shows that pre-existing institutions — namely inheritance rules — shaped the within family intergenerational transmission of resources. This organization is embedded in the family culture that...