China's recently implemented New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), the largest social pension program in the world, was designed to provide financial protection for its rural population and reduce economic inequities. Yet the impact of this program is mitigated if those eligible fail to enroll. This...

China's recently implemented New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), the largest social pension program in the world, was designed to provide financial protection for its rural population and reduce economic inequities. Yet the impact of this program is mitigated if those eligible fail to enroll. This...

This paper studies the role of pensions and income taxes in determining homeownership and household wealth. It provides a cross-country analysis, using tax and pension policy designs in Germany, the US and Australia. These developed nations have similar incomes per capita but very different...

This paper studies the impact of pension reduction on the housing price and wealth distribution in China. We first set up a simple model, conceptually predicting that a pension reduction will boost the housing price and reduce housing wealth inequality. To get a full picture of the impact of...

In 1996 Austria introduced a tax for the layoff of older workers, which was tightened in 2000. The regulation requires employers to pay a tax of up to 170 percent of the gross monthly income when they give notice to employees aged 50 or more. We use data from Austrian social security records to...

Norwegian administrative data are used to evaluate the impact of a doubling of the threshold in the retirement earnings test. We find almost no impact on the extensive margin, but a positive effect on the intensive margin. This positive effect is uneven over the earnings distribution, and...

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...

Developing countries are increasingly aware of the need to design and implement improvements in public systems for providing pensions to the elderly. Such systems may aim to smooth consumption and thus provide reliable income to older people, reduce poverty among the elderly, insure those no...

In this paper we analyze the influence that incentives play in the timing of the transition to retirement in Spain. We use the Continuous Sample of Working Histories 2006 (CSWH 'Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales', in Spanish) to construct incentive measures from the Social Security provisions...

Im Koalitionsvertrag vom 14. März 2018 wird angekündigt, die Leistungen und Beiträge der Gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung durch eine sogenannte »doppelte Haltelinie« festzuschreiben. Konkret soll das Netto-Standardrentenniveau vor Steuern nicht unter 48% absinken und gleichzeitig der...