As part of an ongoing effort to analyze the distributional implications of potential policy reforms to the U.S. Social Security system, we consider the widely discussed reform of earnings sharing. Such an approach has been viewed as a way to “update” Social Security's family benefits based...

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 investigates the fiscal pressure from demographic change in relation to the labour marketspace for fifty countries that cover 75% of the world population. The pressure-to-space indicator ranks Poland, Turkey and Greece high. Apart from Turkey and India, developing countries rank low...

Social partners, trade unions and employer associations have been involved in most changes to the corporatist welfare state of Germany. In 2001, the government enacted a pension reform to replace the generous but - due to demographic constraints - unsustainable pay-as-you-go public pension...

Opponents of allowing younger workers to privately invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through personal accounts have long pointed to the supposed riskiness of private investment. The volatility of private capital markets over the past several years, and especially recent declines in...

Although the Social Security program is progressive - meaning that the replacement rate of preretirement earnings offered by Social Security tends to rise as lifetime earnings decline - this relationship is erratic. While individuals with lower lifetime earnings receive better treatment on...

We provide a long-term perspective on the individual retirement behaviour and on the future of retirement. In a Markovian political economic theoretical framework, in which incentives to retire early are embedded, we derive a political equilibrium with positive social security contribution rates...

The policy brief presents a review of potential effects of parametric pension reform in Belarus starting in 2017 for the population aged 50 and more in terms of unemployment, alcohol consumption, and poverty. It concludes that, despite the fact that raising the retirement age is overdue in...