In the presence of heteroskedasticity, conventional standard errors (which assume homoskedasticity) can be biased up or down. The most common form of heteroskedasticity leads to conventional standard errors that are too small. When Wald tests based on these standard errors are insignificant,...

The extent of demographic changes in Europe and Asia is much more drastic than in the US. This paper studies the effects of population aging on the interactions between economic growth and living standards in Europe with labor market and pension reform, behavioral adaptations, and international...

The option value of postponing retirement is the difference between the utility when retiring at the age that maximizes utility minus the utility when retiring now. This note shows that a utility function which depends only weakly on the value of leisure such as the utility function proposed by...

Aim of this keynote is to develop a framework how to approach the design of pension policies as rationally as possible. The first step is to realize and accommodate endogenous adjustments. The second step is to align the root causes of demographic change with corresponding reform steps which...

A common concern when raising the retirement age is that the delayed retirement of older workers will crowd out younger workers from the labour market causing an increase in youth unemployment. This note shows that there is little empirical evidence to support this concern. Rather, the opposite...

This paper summarizes the main features of SHARE, the “Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe”. SHARE is a comparative pan-European survey aimed at documenting and better under-standing the repercussions of demographic ageing for individuals and society as a whole, and forming a...

In the absence of social security reform, current pension entitlements of an aging population exceed future fiscal capacity. However, structural labor market reforms facilitate the transition to sustainable schemes in which a sizeable part of the current generosity of European welfare states can...

This paper juxtaposes a set of popular myths with evidence and draws three conclusions: First, demography is not destiny – rather, destiny is whether aging societies are able to undergo structural economic reforms which adapt these societies to a different demographic environment. Second,...

The paper motivates and describes the tax treatment of German retirement benefits and pensions after the 2005 reform initiated by the German Federal Constitutional Court. The main question is whether this reform has produced a “level playing field” among the many instruments generating...

This paper describes the principles of economics and their application to oral health and health care. After illustrating the economic determinants of oral health, the demand for oral health care is discussed with particular reference to asymmetric information between patient and provider. The...