The last two decades have been characterised by significant changes in national pension arrangements. While at first, a consensus seemed to be evolving around a one-size-fits-all reform, more recently the trend has been towards a better customisation of reforms. This paper reviews this process,...

Why are the old politically successful? We build a simple interest group model in which political pressure is time-intensive, showing that in the political competitive equilibrium each group lobbies for gvernment policies that lower their own value of time but that the old do so to a greater...

This paper examines how unemployment affects retirement and whether the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system and Social Security (SS) system affect how older workers respond to labor market shocks. To do so, we use pooled cross-sectional data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) as well...

James E. Pesando looks at the 1998 package of reforms to the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) that the federal government and the provinces implemented after extensive consultation. Most significantly, these reforms included: a sharp increase in the combined employer-employee contribution rate, from...

Projections show public pensions to take an increasing share of GDP. This has lead to increased activity in the reform area and resulted in a plethora of reforms ranging from marginal to more radical ones. The former kind has often tried to hold back increasing expenditure by decreasing benefit...

The purpose of this paper is to compare pension schemes with respect to their intergenerational redistributive effects caused by economic and demographic changes. It is shown how these effects depend on the specific design of the pension scheme, with special attention devoted to the indexation...

This paper investigates public pension funding using a dynamic general equilibrium macroeconomic model (DSGE) that facilitates investigation of distortionary effects of fiscal and pension policy responses to ageing. The model is calibrated to the Finnish economy, which will encounter substantial...

We follow individuals as they retire using discrete-time hazard models applied to a stock sample from 12 waves of the British Household Panel Survey. Results confirm that health shocks are a determinant of retirement age and are quantitatively more important than pension entitlement. This is the...

The present paper simulates the privatization of social security in an economy populated by overlapping generations of individuals that have time-consistent or time-inconsistent preferences, face mortality and individual income risk as well as borrowing constraints. We compute the transition...

This paper quantifies the effects of social security on capital accumulation and wealth distribution in a life-cycle framework with altruistic individuals. The main findings of this paper are that the current U.S. social security system has a significant impact on capital accumulation and wealth...