English Abstract: Pension economics has traditionally guided pension policy with the help of formal models based on individuals who think in a life cycle context with perfect foresight, full information and in a time-consistent manner. This paper sheds light on selected aspects of pension...

Pension reforms in many developed countries make individuals shoulder a bigger share of longevity and income risks. The desired response is that individuals accumulate private assets for retirement. Whether this actually takes place, is of paramount relevance for scientists and policy makers. We...

Population aging in the United States poses challenges to societal institutions while simultaneously creating opportunities to build a more resilient, successful, and cohesive society. Work organization and labor-force participation are central to both the opportunities and challenges posed by...

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,...