This paper analyzes the incentives provided by the Italian Social Security System (SS) to supply labor. Italy is an interesting example in this context as: (1) fertility rates are very low while life expectancy has improved dramatically over the past decades; (2) the SS Program is extremely...

This paper uses the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to investigate the role of pension and social security institutions in shaping the European patterns of work and retirement. We provide evidence on the extent of “unused capacity” in labor force, on pathways to...

This paper shows that the “lump of labor” assumption fails in Italy. The direct relationship between the unemployment rate of the young and the labor force participation of the old is pro-cyclical, i.e. a higher labor force participation of the old is related to a lower unemployment rate of...

In this paper we investigate the size of the consumption drop at retirement in Italy. We use micro data on food and total non-durable household spending covering the period 1993-2004, and evaluate the change in consumption that accompanies retirement by exploiting the exogenous variability in...

We analyse the effects of pension reforms on the planned retirement age of women by exploiting within country variation in pension wealth across cohorts of workers in Italy after the Amato and Dini reforms of the early 1990s, which introduced a “Notionally Defined Contribution” (NDC) method...

Three issues dominate the political debate over savings in Europe: First, can private savings substitute for public pensions in the provision of retirement income, given that the current generosity of pay-as-you-go financed pensions is hardly sustainable in the light of population ageing? And if...

Three issues dominate the public policy debate over savings in Continental Europe. First, can private savings substitute for public pensions in the provision of retirement income, given that the current gen-erosity of pay-as-you-go financed pensions is hardly sustainable in the light of...

This paper uses the Survey of Health, Ageing and Wealth (SHAW) to study the relationship between health status and economic welfare at individual level. We develop a model to estimate the welfare cost of ill-health: the terminology and the intuition go along the lines of the equivalence scale...