A means tested minimum income for old age creates in incentive for some not to save for old age and instead to free ride. Recent literature is undecided to what extent this inefficient savings distortion should be even worse. In a simple optimal taxation framework we show that it is Pareto...

Feldstein [1985] posed the questions of what would be the optimal level of retirement benefit, and what would be the optimal mix between the pay-as-you-go system and the funded pension system under the assumption of an exogenous interest rate. We reconsider the problem with the addition of a...

In this paper, we consider how the retirement age as well as a tax financed pension system ought to respond to a change in the standard deviation of the length of life. In a first best framework, where a benevolent government exercises perfect control over the individuals' labor supply and...

The present paper aims to quantify efficiency properties of real world social security systems of various institutional designs in order to identify an optimal pension design. Starting from a benchmark economy without social security, we introduce alternative pension systems and compare the...