In this paper, the authors look at trends in social security reform activity in all of the Nordic countries with the exception of Iceland. They shall first briefly compare the status of the welfare state around 1990 with that of 1997; to be followed by an account of the economic and political...

Public social security systems may provide diversification of risks to individuals' life-time income. Capturing that a pay-as-you-go program (paygo) may be considered as a "quasi-asset", we study the optimal size of the social security program as well as the optimal split between a funded part...

Different versions of pay-as-you-go public pension programs may have entirely different effects on the intergenerational distribution of income risk. If the pension benefit is a fixed proportion of previous income, a pay-as-you-go program increases the income risk of all generations. On the...

In order to stimulate labor market participation and improve the financial viability of the social security systems, many recent reform proposals in various OECD economies suggest to scale down the non-actuarial parts of the pension systems. These reforms have a flavour of increased efficiency...

In their recent paper, Boldrin and Montes (2005) analyzed the “return on human capital investment” theory and showed that if borrowing for education is not possible, then a combined public education and pension system that uses lump-sum revenue from taxes and income transfers can replicate...

We provide evidence on the policy risk of social security in Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia by computing the changes in the social security wealth induced by the pension reforms undertaken since the 1990s. Methodologically we follow upon McHale’s (2001) study of selected reforms in G7...

This paper considers the possibility of letting a pay-go pension system mimic a fully funded pension system. Generically, it turns out to be impossible to make a less than fully funded pension system actuarially fair on average. But a non-funded pay-go pension system can provide an actuarially...

This paper examines the impact of public pensions on saving, life insurance and annuity markets in an adverse selection economy.

This paper seeks to contribute to debate on the issue of reform of pension systems in the EU, in the context of the direct effects of such provisions on fiscal policy.

This paper compares two type of reform of the post-employment wage early retirement program in Danmark: A reduction in benefits, coupled with an increase in the permitted hours of work for participants, and an increase in eligibility age.