Governments have phased out pay-as-you-go pension schemes in favor of funded ones. Instead of dropping the intergenerational transfers of the pay-as-you-go pensions, we propose to invert them. In this way, resources would flow from old to young generations as if it were a system of public...

Pension systems around Europe are being reformed for several decades already. Main objectives of the reforms are to enable people to have adequate income at retirement and to ensure the system's financial sustainability. Many European countries implemented policies aiming at diversification of...

We introduce and analyze a novel collective defined contribution plan (CDC) which guarantees upon retirement at least a target benefit as a lump sum. The guarantee is provided by the remaining working generations under a pre-determined linear intergenerational risk sharing (IRS) rule. Through a...

Intergenerational risk sharing by funded pension schemes may increase welfare in an ex ante sense. However, it also suffers from a time inconsistency problem. In particular, young generations may be unwilling to start participating in a pension scheme if this requires them to make huge transfers...

We analyze the political stability of capital funded social security. In particular, using a stylized theoretical framework we study the mechanisms behind governments capturing pension assets in order to lower current taxes. This is followed by an analysis of the analogous mechanisms in a...

One of the most important consequences of the Chilean pension reform undertaken in the early 1980s was to transfer a significant portion of the risk associated to the financing of pensions, from the State, to the pension fund participants of the newly established compulsory pension system. This...

Social security is increasingly debated in terms of alleged effects of public pensions on economic efficiency. The author reviews the history and rationale for public provision of retirement income, then argues that the efficiency effects of such schemes are negligible. Social security reform in...

The survivor dividend, at a specific age, is the portion of participants' credited account balances that is distributed on a birth cohort basis from the account balances of participants who do not survive to retirement. This paper develops a model to show whether it would be justified to include...

This chapter reviews the literature on intergenerational risk sharing (IRS). We explore to what extent and how a market economy with an appropriate institutional setting can replicate a social planner's solution in models with increasing levels of complexity. In particular, we do this for...

Faced with the need to adjust public pension systems to meet changing demographic, economic and social conditions, most developed countries have created government reserve funds to ensure macroeconomic sustainability. This paper aims to study the importance that this reserve fund plays in the...