Existing political economy models of pensions focus on age and productivity. In this paper we incorporate two additional individual characteristics: sex and marital status. We ignore the role of age, by assuming that people vote at the start of their life, and characterize the preferred rate of...

This paper shows how the role of the market, the state and the family in providing financial support at old age has evolved over time with changes in factors such as the reliability and the effectiveness of family support, the rate of interest, the cost of public funds and earning inequality. We...

This paper studies the optimal linear tax-transfer policy in an economy where agents differ in productivity and in genetic background, and where longevity depends on health spending and genes. It is shown that, if agents internalize imperfectly the impact of genes and health spending on...

This paper analyzes the impact of aging on capital accumulation and welfare in a country with a sizable unfunded social security system. Using a two-period overlapping-generation model with endogenous retirement decisions, we show that both the type of aging and the type of unfunded social...

The purpose of this letter is to analyze the impact of economic integration on capital accumulation and capital flows when countries differ in their social security systems, especially as regards the degree of funding of pensions and the regulation of the retirement age. Funding and early...

Social insurance for the elderly is judged responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or in a first-best setting, there would be no such trend. However, when first-best instruments are not available, because health and productivity are not...

Among the rationales for social security, there is the fact that some people have to be forced to save. To explain undersaving, rational prodigality and hyperbolic preferences are often cited but treated separably. In this paper we study those two particular behaviors that lead to forced saving...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical evaluation of theoretical models showing that shifting from pay-as-you-go to funded social security schemes can be made Pareto-improving. Further, it argues that what often makes a reform toward funded schemes attractive is a number of...

This paper studies the determination through majority voting of a pension scheme when society consists of far-sighted and myopic individuals. All individuals have the same basic preferences but myopics tend to adopt a short term view (instant gratification) when dealing with retirement saving....

We consider a two-period overlapping generations model in which individual voters differ not only according to age but also productivity. In such a setting, a (redistributive) Pay-As-You-Go system is politically sustainable, even when the interest rate is larger than the rate of population...