We study the design of retirement and disability policies and illustrate the often observed exit from the labor force of healthy workers through disability insurance schemes. In our model, two types of individuals, disabled and leisure-prone ones, have the same disutility for labor and cannot be...

Social insurance for the elderly is judged responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or in a first-best setting, there would be no such trend. However, when first-best instruments are not available, because health and productivity are not...

This paper studies the design of retirement and disability policies when individuals differ in both productivity and health. The second-best solution implies (downward) distortions in the (per-period) labor supply and in the choice of retirement age for some individuals, and lesser...

In many countries pension systems involve some form of earnings test; i.e., an individual’s benefits are reduced if he has labour income. This paper examines whether or not such earning tests emerge when pension system and income tax are optimally designed. We use a simple model with...

This paper studies the determination through majority voting of a pension scheme when society consists of far-sighted and myopic individuals. All individuals have the same basic preferences but myopics tend to adopt a short term view (instant gratification) when dealing with retirement saving....

This paper studies the design of retirement and disability policies. It illustrates the often observed exit from the labour force of healthy workers through disability insurance schemes. Two types of individuals, disabled and leisure-prone ones, have the same disutility for labour and cannot be...

In several OECD countries, public pay-as-you-go pension systems have undergone major reforms in which future retirement benefit promises have been scaled down. A consequence of these reforms is that, especially in countries with a tight tax - benefit linkage, the retirement benefit claims of...

This paper studies the optimal linear pension scheme when society consists of rational and myopic individuals. Myopic individuals have, ex ante, a strong preference for the present even though, ex post, they would regret not to have saved enough. While rational and myopic persons share the same...

It is often argued that the observed trend towards early retirement is due mainly to the implicit tax imposed on continued activity of elderly workers. We study the relevance of such a distortion in a political economy model with endogenous age of retirement. The setting is a two-period...

The book analyzes the German welfare state. It starts from a theoretical perspective and then develops changes in social security, public health care, and unemployment insurance.