We explore the importance and nature of elderly couples' labor market interlinkages, and how such linkages shape the response to welfare reforms. To this end, we build a life cycle model with dual-earner households, featuring heterogeneous age gaps, non-separable leisure preferences, and...

In this paper, the author deals with the question how to make PAYG pension systems financially resistant to fluctuating fertility rates. The author presents two pension schemes that lead to a permanently balanced budget but differ in the mixture of changes in the contribution rates and...

In this paper I derive the optimal portfolio mix between a funded and an unfunded pension system when people care about their consumption relative to a reference group. Pay-as-you-go systems with fixed contribution rates have the property that pension benefits are tied to labor income. This...

In this paper I study how PAYG pension systems of the notional defined contribution type can be designed such that they remain financially stable in the presence of increasing life expectancy. For this to happen two crucial parameters must be set in an appropriate way. First, the remaining life...

In this paper I study the impact of increasing longevity on pay-as-you-go pension systems. First, I show that increasing longevity increases their internal rate of return. The size of the effect di ers for di erent policy regimes. It is higher for the case where the retirement age is increased...

The paper studies how the rates of deduction for early retirement have to be determined in PAYG systems in order to keep their budget stable. I show that the budget-neutral deductions depend on the speci_c rules of the pension system and on the choice of the discount rate which itself depends on...

This study combines data from the HFCS (Household Finance and Consumption Survey) and the social security registry to estimate the present value of public pension entitlements for Austria in the year 2017. The household averages of the present value of pension entitlements and of private net...

The aging of the global population is in the headlines following a report that China's population fell as deaths surpassed births. Pundits worry that a declining Chinese workforce means trouble for other economies that have come to rely on China's exports. France is pushing through an increase...

The paper exploits a unique social experiment carried out in 1988 in Sweden to identify the effect of monitoring on sickness absence. The treatment consists of postponing the first formal point of monitoring during a sickness absence spell, a requirement for a doctor’s certificate, from day...

This paper looks at a specific type of moral hazard that arises in the interplay between two large public insurance systems in Sweden, namely the sickness insurance (SI) and the unemployment insurance (UI). Moral hazard can arise from the benefit size structure as for some unemployed persons,...