Projected demographic changes in industrialized and developing countries vary in extent and timing but will reduce the share of the population in working age everywhere. Conventional wisdom suggests that this will increase capital intensity with falling rates of return to capital and increasing...

Pension systems in most industrialised countries are unfunded, i.e. they are pay-as-you-go financed and thus depend on a well-balanced ratio (old) recipients to (young) contributors. This so-called dependency ratio will worsen significantly in the next few decades due to two developments: ageing...

We incorporate Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses (KUJ) preferences into the Blanchard-Yaari (BY) framework and develop, using an AK technology, a model of balanced growth. In this context we investigate status preference, demographic, and pension policy shocks. We find that a higher degree of KUJ...

This paper presents four policy options to make Social Security sustainable under the coming demographic shift: 1) increase payroll taxes by 6 percentage points, 2) reduce the replacement rates of the benefit formula by one-third, 3) raise the normal retirement age from sixty-six to...