Pension taxation has large budgetary and distributional effects, in particular in the light of ageing societies and the importance of pension benefits in old-age income. This paper investigates the impact of taxing public and mandatory occupational old-age pensions in the EU, focusing on both...

Fertility has long been declining in industrialised countries and the existence of public pension systems is considered as one of the causes. This paper is the first to provide detailed evidence based on historical data on the mechanism by which a public pension system depresses fertility. Our...

This paper contributes to the literature on the weakness of modern pay-as-yougo social security systems in financing pensions by taking a business and economic historical perspective on the issue. It focuses on Prussian Knappschaften (plural of Knappschaft), which provided miners with compulsory...

The demographic transition is a phenomenon affecting many industrialized societies. These economies are experiencing a decline in mortality alongside low fertility rates - a situation that puts social security systems under severe pressure. To implement appropriate reform measures, adequate...

We examine forecast accuracy and efficiency of the Social Security Administration's projections for cost rate, trust fund balance, trust fund ratio made during 1980-2020 with horizons up to 95 years. We find that the reported deterioration in the accuracy of the forecasts during 2010’s has...

The paper examines social security (public pension) reforms in which the programme is partially shifted from a public unfunded basis to a private, prefunded, basis. It focuses on reforms where individuals have a choice in switching from public funded to private unfunded programmes (as in the...

In most industrialized countries, the work and family patterns of the baby boomers characterized by more heterogeneous working careers and less stable family lives set them apart from preceding cohorts. Thus, it is of crucial importance to understand how these different work and family lives are...

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...

Pension benefit rules depend on individual history far more than taxes do, and age plays a much larger role in pension determination than in tax determination. Apart from some simulation studies, theoretical studies of optimal tax design typically contain neither a mandatory pension system nor...