The Swedish pension reform of 1999-2003 provides an opportunity to study whether and how important economic incentives are for the timing of retirement. The new pension system provides a much closer link between contributions and benefits than the former system. I study whether the reform has...

Ageing puts a strain on most countries' pension systems; forecasts show them to be more or less unsustainable. Evidence from social choice research, theoretical as well as empirical, does not seem to offer a way out of the dilemma, as the median voter will resist a reform. Despite this, Sweden...

Many Western countries with an aging population consider reforms of their pay-as-you-go pension systems. In Sweden a new pension system has already been decided and implemented. This paper gives a brief background to the Swedish reforms in the 1990s and explains the structure of the new system.

While the health risks associated with smoking are well known, the impact on income distributions is not. This paper extends the literature by examining the distributional effects of a behavioral choice, in this case smoking, on net marginal Social Security tax rates (NMSSTR). The results show...

We analyze the effect of the projected demographic transition on the political support for social security, and equilibrium outcomes. Embedding a probabilistic-voting setup of electoral competition in the Diamond (1965) OLG model, we find that intergenerational transfers arise in the absence of...

We extend "economic equivalence" results, like the Ricardian equivalence proposition, to the political sphere where policy is chosen sequentially. We derive conditions under which a policy regime (summarizing admissible policy choices in every period) and a state are "politico-economically...

This paper introduces macroeconomic forecasters as political agents and suggests that they use their forecasts to in uence voting outcomes. We develop a probabilistic voting model in which voters do not have complete information about the future states of the economy and have to rely on...

The purpose of this study is to provide an alternate approach to studies of the rhetoric of policy-relevant economics. Martin Feldstein's pro-privatization rhetoric relative to Social Security is first analyzed. A subsequent comparison his rhetoric to that of George W. Bush concludes that both...

Although economic circumstances have been argued to be a major determining factor of attitudes to redistribution, there is little well identified evidence at the individual level. Utilizing a unique dataset, with detailed individual information, provides new and convincing evidence on the link...

I investigate the effect of income on mortality of the pensioners, com- paring three subsequent policy periods in Austria. The pensioners who retired in the second period received 25% lower pension than those in the first period. This reduction in income was removed in the third policy period....