Recent reforms that aim at reducing the upcoming burdens of population ageing might seriously harm low income individuals. An increase in old-age poverty and disability will be the result. Under this prospect, the present paper quantitatively characterizes the optimal progressivity of unfunded...

Over the years, the Belgian social security system has undergone substantial reform with a prime focus on increasing older worker labor force participation. The paper explores the effect of past reforms on inequality in old age. We distinguish two separate effects: The mechanical effect...

We study the influence of family members, neighbors and coworkers on retirement behavior. To estimate causal retirement spillovers between individuals, we exploit a pension reform in the Netherlands that creates exogenous variation in peers' retirement ages, and we use administrative data on the...

Der vorliegende Referentenentwurf zum Rentenpaket II sieht neben einer Verlängerung der Haltelinie zur Stabilisierung des Rentenniveaus die Errichtung einer Stiftung "Generationenkapital" vor. Der Entwurf strebt dabei den Aufbau eines Stiftungsvermögens von 200 Mrd. Euro und jährliche...

I investigate a Danish policy reform that postpones social security eligibility tied to an increase in life expectancy. The reform creates sharp discontinuities based on exact birth dates, allowing for the identification of causal effects. Using both administrative and survey data, I document a...

This paper quantifies the effect of Poland's 1999 pension reform on the inequality of future pension benefits. The reform increases inequality, both in the upper and lower parts of the distribution. The estimates, based on the 2012 Polish Household Budget Survey, show that the Gini coefficient...

This paper examines the implicit subsidies within pension systems across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. We first calculate the theoretical benefits of pension for hypothetical workers in 25 countries in LAC. We show that, on average, LAC's pension systems are subsidized, as they...

Using variation in federal pandemic-era fiscal aid to states driven by the strength of political representation, we find that incremental pandemic-era fiscal aid to states was most likely to end up in the categories of general administrative service spending and employee pension benefit funding....

Recently several countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, have at least partially reversed their earlier moves towards compulsory defined-contribution schemes. This paper concentrates on Poland, which just reduced contributions going to the...

Life expectancies are rapidly increasing and uncertain in all countries in Europe. To keep pension systems affordable, policy reforms are to be implemented which will encourage individuals to work longer. In this paper we analyze the impact of working and living longer on pension incomes in five...