Demographic projections forecast a doubling of the dependency ratio until 2050 as well as an increase of 10% in population due to longer life expectancy in Switzerland. To quantify the effects on social security and public finances, we use a computational overlapping generations model with five...

In 1995, the Social Security Administration started sending out the annual Social Security Statement. It contains information about the worker's estimated benefits at the ages 62, 65, and 70. I use this unique natural experiment to analyze the retirement and claiming decision making. First, I...

Using a rich micro dataset drawn from administrative archives, we explore whether Social Security Wealth (SSW) is an important factor affecting the decision to become self-employed in Italy. We focus on the two main categories of self-employed professions covered by the Italian public pension...

In this paper we analyze the consequences of pension funding in a general equilibrium model of both formal schooling decisions and on-the-job human capital formation à la Heckman, Lochner and Taber (1998). Our focus lies on the distortive and redistributive effects of a Bismarckian pension...

Flexible retirement - that is the opportunity to choose one’s own personal retirement age - serves as a hedge against pension risk and provides insurance to workers facing health or productivity shocks. Flexible retirement and flexible pension schemes are in practice closely linked because of...

The present paper studies the growth and efficiency consequences of pension funding with individual retirement accounts in a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic lifespan and labor income uncertainty. We distinguish between economies with rational and hyperbolic...

We analyze expectations of the Dutch population of ages 25 and older concerning the future generosity of Dutch state and occupational pensions, the two main pillars of the Dutch pension system. Since the summer of 2006, monthly survey data were collected on the expectations of Dutch households...

The paper provides a perspective on the development of the Belgian disability insurance system. Using both survey and administrative data, it sketches a picture of the (changing) factors leading towards disability, as well as the outcomes in terms of program participation. The paper shows the...

Using Italian data, we estimate an option value model to quantify the effect of financial incentives on retirement choices. As far as we know, this is the first empirical study to estimate the conditional multiple-years model put forward by Stock and Wise (1990). This implies that we account for...

This paper explores the effect of letting individuals choose their retirement age in a world of uncertainty where there exist both defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) pension plans. The paper shows that giving individuals the flexibility to determine when to retire is an important...