The Social Security "full retirement age" (FRA) is the age at which retirement income benefits are available without reduction for early commencement. Presently, that age is 67 for those born in 1960 or later. This paper is about the unfair and unnecessary threat to reduce Social Security...

We study optimal tax policies with human capital investment and retirement savings for present-biased agents. Agents are heterogeneous in their innate ability and make risky education investments which determines their labor productivity. We demonstrate that the optimal distortions vary with...

This paper studies the role of wage and pension pressures in explaining the budget deficit crisis of 1991–2 after the remarkable 1990 Polish economic stabilization and liberalization. It also explains the persistence of the high tax wedge that later helped overcome the budget crisis. The...

There are many decisions that Americans have to make about retirement before, at, and after retirement. For example, Americans have to decide when to start saving for retirement, how much to save, how to invest those savings, when to retire, when to claim social security, and how to take...

A structural model for retirement and employment based on a flexible, parametric utility function is developed. The model requires only cross section data and is estimated on survey data for Italy and register data for Norway. The estimates indicate that the preference structure among...

We study the welfare effects of earnings testing flat-rate old-age benefits in a quantitative overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic labor income risk. In our model economy, even a moderate earnings testing reduces individuals' expected lifetime utility. Moreover, it also lowers the...

We compute the optimal dynamic asset allocation policy for a retiree with Epstein-Zin utility. The retiree can decide how much he consumes and how much he invests in stocks, bonds, and annuities. Pricing the annuities we account for asymmetric mortality beliefs and administration expenses. We...

The Swedish pension reform of 1999-2003 provides an opportunity to study whether and how important economic incentives are for the timing of retirement. The new pension system provides a much closer link between contributions and benefits than the former system. I study whether the reform has...

Knowledge about how elderly workers react to changes in pension benefits is important in guiding the design of social security systems. This paper contributes to this knowledge by examining the effect of changed replacement rates on part-time retirement behaviour in Sweden. During the 1980s,...

For the purpose of studying the consequences of the ageing of the Swedish population a group of scientists have enlarged the microsimulation model SESIM - originally developed at the Swedish Ministry of Finance - with modules that simulate health status, take up of sickness benefits, retirement,...