Economists have long been puzzled by the low demand for life annuities. To shed new light on this puzzle, we study payout choices in the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System, where each retiree must choose between a lump sum and a life annuity. Notably, the average life annuity we study is...

Governments are major employers, and usually provide defined-benefit (DB) pension plans with full inflation indexing and generous early retirement provisions. Hence, changes in thinking about, and accounting for, the costs of DB pension plans have major implications for government finances. Both...

This paper addresses investment and spending policies of endowment funds aiming to generate a stable income stream in perpetuity. The standard academic approach to the design of such policies is based on optimization of utility aggregated over time. However, the explicit purpose of many funds to...

Several recent studies have examined the steady-state welfare implications of mortality differentials within unfunded Social Security systems, concluding that these differentials undermine the progressivity of the system and make society worse-off relative to alternative public pension schemes....

Economic inequality in America continues to grow, taking on ever greater economic and political importance. The reasons for increasing inequality are complex and widely debated, as are potential policies to address it. This paper focuses on a vital but unrecognized part of the story: how the...

We discuss public pension systems in a multi-period overlapping generations model with gerontologically founded human aging and a special focus on occupation-specific morbidity and mortality. We examine how distinct replacement rates for white-collar and blue-collar workers and early retirement...

Prior research finds that retirees don’t spend nearly as much as they could from their investments. Economic theory provides both rational and behavioral explanations for under-spending among retirees with high non-annuitized wealth. Longevity risk will result in lower spending among rational,...

Variations among the diverse pension systems in the member states of the European Union (EU) hamper labor market mobility across national borders and also among firms within the countries of the EU. From a macroeconomic perspective, and in the light of demographic pressure, this paper argues...

Some computational aspects of pension plans are discussed in the paper with applications for the pension system in the Czech Republic: (i) the gender problem for the pensions; (ii) the generation Life Tables; (iii) the problem of sustainability of the pensions in the Czech Republic. These...

Active labour market policies are commonly used tool to fight unemployment. In the early 1960's all Scandinavian countries have introduced several different measures to have an effect on their labour markets. In the late 1970's in most developed countries of OECD government expenditures on those...