<p>Mark Hyde and John Dixon review Shapiro's (2007) <em>Is the Welfare State Justified?</em>, assessing its merits as well as its flaws.</p>

Pension reform is high on the policy agenda of many advanced and emerging market economies. In advanced economies the challenge is generally to contain future increases in public pension spending as the population ages. In emerging market economies, the challenges are often different. Where...

How might retirees consider deploying the retirement assets accumulated in a defined contribution pension plan? One possibility would be to purchase an immediate annuity. Another approach, called the phased withdrawal strategy in the literature, would have the retiree invest his funds and then...

As most developed countries, France has gone over the last 20 years through a process of pension system reforms, mainly aiming at increasing the average retirement age, through increasing the required number of contribution years or through postponing legal (minimal and/or normal) ages. Public...

The paper studies retirement behavior of wage-earners in Belgium—for the first time using a rich survey dataset to analyze retirement incentives as faced by individuals. Specifically, we use SHARE data to estimate a model à la Stock and Wise (Econom Econ Soc 58(5):1151–1180, <CitationRef CitationID="CR11">1990</CitationRef>)....</citationref>

In recent years, the economic landscape for defined benefit (DB) pension schemes has evolved dramatically for the worse. Among the ongoing challenges are the continued weaknesses in equity markets, falling interest rates, inflation levels that persist despite a drop in economic activity, and...

H52, H55, I28 </AbstractSection> Copyright Stenberg and Westerlund; licensee Springer. 2013

This paper considers an individual's problem and effects on savings for retirement. We show using a deterministic model, a linear utility function and assuming an individual can benefit from a tax break in savings, that under reasonable circumstances, there is only one switch from not saving to...