Life expectancy, heavy work and the return to education: lessons for the social security reform

In most industrial countries, while the calculation of pension bene…ts is progressive, public pension systems redistribute weakly from high to low- income earners. They are close to actuarial fairness. This statement results from the following speci…city: less paid jobs are also heavier and health- damaging jobs involving losses in life expectancy. As avoiding low earnings and hard-working conditions require acquisition of skills, we study conjointly in this article the impact of social security and the work-related life expectancy loss on the schooling decision. We then study macroeconomic and distributional consequences of global gain in life expectancy associated with di¤erent social security reforms, focusing particularly on spillover e¤ects possibly generated by education.