In many countries, both pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and funding are used to finance pensions, although the balance between the two principles differs a lot between countries. Over the last decades, many countries made a gradual transition to more funding. In this paper, we develop an analytical...

In many countries, collective funded pension schemes with defined benefits (DB) are being replaced by individual schemes with defined contributions. Collective funded DB pensions may indeed reduce social welfare. This will be the case when the schemes feature income-related contributions that...

This paper stems from the observation that there are two world-wide trends, pension reform and population ageing, and asks whether the two may be related. Exploring the cases of pension reform in different countries, we find that, although they are very different, the cases share a common...

Collective pension contracts allow for intergenerational risk sharing with the unborn. They therefore imply a higher level of social welfare than individual accounts. Collective pension contracts also imply a sub-optimal allocation of consumption across time periods and states of nature however....

Although the market for inflation-linked bonds has expanded enormously, nominal bonds are still the main instrument to finance public debts. This paper seeks to explain why. It focuses on the Eurozone countries for which the standard argument that inflation-linked bonds may help to reduce...