The purpose of this letter is to analyze the impact of economic integration when countries differ in their social security systems, more specifically in the degree of funding of their pensions, and in the regulation of the retirement age. Funding and mandatory early retirement are two features...

Long term care (LTC) is mainly provided by the family and subsidiarily by the market and the government. To understand the role of these three institutions it is important to understand the motives and the working of family solidarity. In this paper we focus on the case when LTC is provided by...

Introduced by Samuelson (1975), the Serendipity Theorem states that the competitive economy will converge towards the optimum steady-state provided the optimum population growth rate is imposed. This paper aims at exploring whether the Serendipity Theorem still holds in an economy with risky...

This paper studies the role of private and public long term care (LTC) insurance programs in a world in which family assistance is uncertain. Benefits are paid in case of disability but cannot be conditioned (directly), due to moral hazard problems, on family aid. Under a topping up scheme, when...

A premature death unexpectedly brings a life and a career to their end, leading to substantial welfare losses. We study the retirement decision in an economy with risky lifetime, and compare the laissez-faire with egalitarian social optima. We consider two social objectives: (1) the maximin on...

The world’s aging population is expected to shape the future of economies across the globe. Without behavioral adaptation by current and future generations, this demographic transformation is likely to slow down economic growth. However, aging will also induce behavioral adjustments in savings...

When accidental bequests signal otherwise unobservable individual characteristics such as productivity and longevity, the tax administration should partition the population into two groups: One consisting of people who do not receive an inheritance and the other of those who do. The first tagged...

Social insurance for the elderly is judged responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or in a first-best setting, there would be no such trend. However, when first-best instruments are not available, because health and productivity are not...