The paper reviews recent research on the impact of an aging population on the distribution of income. After briefly discussing the demographic conditions responsible for population aging, a short account is given of demographic trends in the industrialized world. In order to disentangle the many...

Immigration has been popularised in the economics literature as a tool to balance the troubled PAYG pension systems. A pivotal research by Razin and Sadka showed that unskilled immigration can surmount the pension problem and, further, boost the general welfare in the host economy. However a...

The main aim of the paper is to reveal philosophical drawbacks of the current paradigm of the pension system. The main conclusion is that pension system as unified mandatory salary insurance is transforming into hybrids of free-will private savings and investments in human capital and government...

We estimate the crowding out of private transfers caused by 70 y Más – a public assistance program for the rural elderly in Mexico for whom family support is an important source of income. Using data from the Mexican Income and Expenditure Survey and a triple difference approach, we find that...

Using a sample of 20 OECD countries it is shown that the majority of countries decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the first pillar of their pension systems, though the evidence is weak in statistical terms. We find strong correlations between changes of the so-called...

Within the last years, the development of the pension value (Rentenwert), which determines the size of public pension benefits in the German public pension system, was strongly affected by discretional changes in the method of its calculation. The aim of the present study is to shed light on the...

This paper estimates the crowding out of private transfers caused by 70 y Más -a public assistance program for rural elderly adults in Mexico, for whom family support is an important source of income. Using data from the National Household Income and Expenditure Survey and a triple-difference...

While linkages between some macroeconomic phenomena (e.g. unemployment, GDP growth) and suicide rates in some countries have been explored, only one study, hitherto, has established a causal relationship between fiscal consolidation and suicide, albeit in a single country. This study examines...

This study examines whether or not aging is increasing the political influence wielded by Japan’s elderly and promoting a so-called “gray democracy.” Using a median voter model based on data from Japan’s 47 prefectures during the period from 2000 to 2010, we examined the relationship...

This paper examines the distributional implications of introducing additional means testing of Social Security benefits where proceeds are used to help balance Social Security's finances. Benefits of the top quarter of households ranked according to the relevant measure of means are reduced...