The aging of the American population will be a critical public policy issue in the years ahead. This paper surveys the recent literature on the economics of aging, with a special emphasis on government spending on the aged. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that the proportion of the elderly in...

Conventional pension systems suffer from a design defect which makes them financially unsustainable, and a source of inefficiency for the economy as a whole. The paper outlines a second-best policy which includes a public pension system made up of two parallel schemes, a Bismarckian one allowing...

The goal of this study is to present an insider view on the pension reforms implemented in Hungary between 1996 and 2009. Both political economy as well as institutional economics will be used as the main approaches to analyse and explain the reform process and some of its effects. The following...

Many pay-as-you-go pension systems have increased or plan to increase their legal retirement age (LRA) to address the financial consequences of ageing. Although the success of these policies is ultimately determined at the labour market, little is known about the effects of higher LRAs at the...

We examine the impact of mandatory retirement on the retirement decisions of professors in Canada using administrative data. We find that the age distributions of professors at universities without mandatory retirement and those at universities with mandatory retirement at age 65 have diverged...

The public pension system in Germany allows early retirement albeit at the cost of pension deductions. Deductions are calculated under the assumption that life expectancy is independent of the age of retirement and apply equally for men and women. The "fair" amount of deductions is currently...

Using data from the Brazilian Census 2000 we estimate whether the distribution of the eligible population of the Continuous Cash Benefit (BPC) would change after a modification in definition of family used to calculate family per capita income. Our results show that in 2000 the majority of...

We estimate the distributions of the eligible public, benefits and coverage levels of the Brazilian Continuous Cash Benefit Program (BPC) using survey data from the 2000 Census and the 2006 National Household Survey. The estimates show that the eligible population is uniformly distributed along...

Phased retirement has been discussed as a means for increasing labour supply for people of older active age. The idea is that instead of leaving a full-time job early for full-time retirement, an employee should reduce the working time either in the same job or by changing jobs, and stay on in...