Households that postpone claiming Social Security benefits are, in effect, making additional purchases of the Social Security annuity and acquiring valuable longevity insurance. This paper investigates the impact of plausible variations of subjective mortality beliefs on the value of delayed...

In a two-period model with agent heterogeneity we analyze a pension reform toward a stronger link between contributions and benefits (as recently observed in several countries) in a pension system with a Bismarckian and a Beveridgian component. We show that such a policy change reduces the...

I examine if the positive correlation between wealth and survivorship has any implications for the progressivity of Social Security's current benefit-earnings rule. Using a general-equilibrium macroeconomic model calibrated to the U.S. economy, I show that the optimal benefit-earnings link for...

The strong and increasing positive correlation between lifetime income and life expectancy (the longevity gap) has recently been widely studied. In this paper we employ the simplest, minimal model to demonstrate the impact of this long-neglected fact on the various types of public pension...