Municipal employees and private-sector employees in Finland belong to separate earnings-related pension systems. Both systems are financed by contributions from the payroll, and are mostly pay-as-you-go. Thus if a municipality decides to buy services from the private sector, instead of producing...

Elderly people could markedly increase they standard of living by releasing their housing equity. Purchase of a single-payment life annuity would increase the benefits of this release. The tax treatment of these annuities is, however, very strict in Finland, because both yield and capital are...

Many elderly people in Finland could increase they standard of living and receive more freedom of choice regarding long-term care by releasing part of their housing equity. The possibility to purchase reasonably priced life annuities and long-term care insurance would increase the benefits of...

This study analyses financial sustainability of the Finnish public sector. Current tax rates are unlikely to yield sufficient tax revenue for financing public expenditure under an ageing population. In the base alternative we assume that the European crisis does not worsen and that productivity...

This study analyses the adjustment of the Finnish earnings-related pension system to very low economic growth. The results show that a permanently lower growth rate of the wage bill would raise only moderately the pension contribution rates in the long term. This is because also the benefits are...

We study the use of pension funds in the Finnish earnings-related pension system with the aim of smoothing contributions over time under demographic and economic risks. Smoothing is affected by the revisions in long-term forecasts and is thus imperfect. As a partially funded defined-benefit...

This Report analyzes the impacts of population ageing on the Finnish economy and the possibilities to avoid its negative effects by increasing net migration. Our calculations show that a yearly net migration of 44,000 persons is needed to stabilize the size of the birth cohorts and the labor...

Radical innovations require risk-taking. However, it is hard to find an objective measure for innovation investments that would take riskiness into account. In this paper, we investigate how a simple measure of firms’ innovation investments, namely the employee share of managers and...

This paper studies the taxation of non-listed companies and their owners in Finland. We first describe the main features of the Finnish tax system regarding the taxation of dividends from non-listed companies. We use firm-level data to illustrate how the tax incentives are reflected in firms’...

Workers have different abilities in research, development and innovation (R&D&I) activities. Firms have different “prospects for innovation”. Innovation is facilitated by matching innovators, i.e. workers that are specialized in R&D&I to firms with good prospects for innovation. Aggregate...