Increasing longevity causes an upward trend in the dependency ratio in many countries. This raises concerns about the financial sustainability of social security schemes, and reform initiatives and proposals abound. It is shown that a fundamental policy choice inevitably arises since a given...

In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....

How much retirement income is needed in order to maintain one’s living standard at old age? As it is difficult to find a firm basis for an empirical treatment of this question, we employ a novel approach to assessing an adequate replacement rate vis-à-vis income in the pre-retirement period....

Fertility has long been declining in industrialised countries and the existence of public pension systems is considered as one of the causes. This paper is the first to provide detailed evidence based on historical data on the mechanism by which a public pension system depresses fertility. Our...

The labor-leisure distortion of a pay-as-you-go pension system can be reduced through a stronger tax-benefit link or Bismarck pension system. Distortions of the fertility decision can be reduced through the introduction of a stronger child-benefit or child pension system.Within our optimal...

A pay-as-you-go pension scheme is associated with positive externalities of having children and providing them with human capital. In a framework with heterogeneity in productivity, and stochastic and endogenous investment in fertility and education, we discuss internalization policies...

This paper discusses alternative ways to deal with the positive externalities of having children in a pay-as-you-go pension system. Family allowances are compared to introducing a fertility-related component into the pension formula. In an endogenous labor supply setting, both instruments are...

We investigate the responsiveness of individual retirement decisions to changes in financial incentives. A reform increased women's normal retirement age (NRA) in two steps from age 62 to age 63 first and then to age 64. At the same time retirement at the previous NRA became possible at a...

We study the short-, medium-, and long-run implications of stimulating annuity markets in a dynamic general-equilibrium overlapping-generations model. We find that beneficial partial-equilibrium effects of stimulating annuity markets are counteracted by negative general-equilibrium...

This paper uses stochastic simulations on calibrated models to assess the optimal degree of reliance on fun ded pensions and on a particular type of unfunded (PAYG) pension. Surprisingly little is known about the optimal split between funded and unfunded systems when there are sources of...