Paul Samuelson made a series of important contributions to population theory for humans and other species, evolutionary theory, and the theory of age structured life cycles in economic equilibrium and growth. The work is highly abstract but much of it was intended to illuminate issues of...

Increasing longevity causes an upward trend in the dependency ratio in many countries. This raises concerns about the financial sustainability of social security schemes, and reform initiatives and proposals abound. It is shown that a fundamental policy choice inevitably arises since a given...

Many countries face the problem of how to reform social security systems to cope with increasing life expectancy. This raises questions concerning both distribution and risk sharing across generations. These issues are addressed within an OLG model with stochastic life expectancy across...

This paper presents a stochastic integrated model to forecast the German population and labour supply until 2060. Within a cohort-component approach, the population forecast applies principal components to birth, mortality, emigration and immigration rates. The labour force participation rates...

When the future evolution of demographic processes is described in a stochastic setting, the challenge is to communicate the meaning of forecast uncertainty in an understandable way, to decision makers and public at large. For the purpose of risk communication, a formal setting is developed, in...

This chapter provides a review of some implications of demographic shift arising from population aging for fiscal policy, taxation policy, and social security settings. The key implications of population aging that have been forthcoming from the many national and international macroeconomic...

This paper studies retirement and child support policies in a small, open, overlapping-generations economy with PAYG social security and endogenous retirement and fertility decisions. It demonstrates that neither fertility nor retirement choices necessarily coincide with socially optimal...

In his seminal model (Feldstein, 1985), the government operates a social security system to counter the representative worker's myopia. (i) For a complete myope, he determined a sizable optimal tax rate (and the corresponding benefit level). (ii) For a partially shortsighted worker, he...

Differences in life expectancy between high and low socioeconomic groups are often large and have widened recently in many countries. Such longevity gaps affect the actuarial fairness and progressivity of public pension systems. However, behavioral responses to longevity and policy complicate...

We consider three transfer models with a representative individual who discounts the utility of the merit good with respect to the standard one's. In each model, a paternalistic government taxes the consumer and transfers him additional merit goods in return. The private purchase of the merit...