This paper discusses design errors in public pension systems, using Hungary as an illus-tration. When the communist political and economic system was replaced by democracy and market economy, the subsequent governments had even greater difficulties in designing consistent pension reforms than...

The strong and increasing positive correlation between lifetime income and life expectancy (the longevity gap) has recently been widely studied. In this paper we employ the simplest, minimal model to demonstrate the impact of this long-neglected fact on the various types of public pension...

This purpose of this paper is to analyze pension policy in an autocracy, using contemporary Hungary as a context. The inefficiencies and unfairness of the current policy can be characterized by tensions: the intra- and intercohort polarization of benefits rises, the difference between the loose...

Studying the age-dimension of the probability distribution of pensions while assuming steadily rising real wages and time-invariant benefit-rules, two factors play important roles: (i) the weight of the wages in indexation of benefits in progress; (ii) the longevity gap. Factor (i) acts against...

The dependence of benefit on the retirement age (the schedule) is an important feature in any public pension system. The nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) pension system has recently become popular mainly because of its allegedly actuarial fairness. Using the framework of mechanism design...

This paper surveys the most significant problems of the pension systems of EU11 countries. These nations had to transform their old-age social security systems after replacing a state-socialist economic order with a capitalist one. Stressing common as well as specific features, our paper...