In this paper, we contribute to the current debate on the Italian pension system by analyzing the impact of social security reforms, in terms of both budgetary implications and distributional effects. This is done by simulating the effects of three hypothetical reforms, plus the effects of the...

We describe the historical evolution of the Spanish Social Security system and its current organization. Our attention concentrates on the main public pension scheme for private employees in the manufacturing and service sector (RGSS) which covers by far the largest majority of Spanish workers....

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...

The European Community Household Panel (ECHP) is a very ambitious project whose main purpose is to collect comparable economic, social and demographic information at the individual and the household level throughout the European Union (EU). An attractive feature of the ECHP is its comparability...

This paper presents some micro-level evidence on the role of the socio-demographic characteristics of the population and the characteristics of the data collection process as predictors of survey response. Our evidence is based on the public use files of the European Community Household Panel...