This paper employs an overlapping generations model to explore the impact of public abatement on private investment and the intergenerational distribution of welfare. Whereas public abatement benefits old generations in terms of non-environmental welfare, future generations gain most in terms of...

Rising longevity and falling fertility threaten the sustainability of pay-as-you-go pension chemes. This paper shows that maintaining the intergenerational balance in the Dutch pay-as-you-go pension scheme in the face of increased longevity since the introduction of the scheme in 1957 would have...

A number of trends are changing the nature of social risks and increase the importance of human capital, adaptability and flexibility. This paper discusses the usefulness of a lifecourse perspective in developing proactive social policies that better fit the changing life cycles of individuals...

This paper reviews the literature on the optimal design and regulation of funded pension schemes. We first characterize optimal saving and investment over an individual’s life cycle. Within a stylized modeling framework, we explore optimal individual saving and investing behavior....

This paper discusses recent reforms of social insurance in the Netherlands. It describes how a serious economic crisis in the beginning of the 1980s set the stage for the subsequent reform process. The most fundamental reforms were introduced in the areas of sickness insurance, which was...

The Netherlands has abolished the tax on actual personal capital income and has replaced it by a presumptive capital income tax, which is in fact a net wealth tax. This paper contrasts this wealth tax with a conventional realization-based capital gains tax, a retrospective capital gains tax with...