An understanding of the financial and distributional consequences of Social Security reform requires knowledge about the actual life circumstances of participants, including the level and pattern of their lifetime earnings and their age at retirement. Some analyses of Social Security reform make...

An understanding of the financial and distributional consequences of Social Security reform requires knowledge about the actual life circumstances of participants, including the level and pattern of their lifetime earnings and when they retire. Some analyses of Social Security reform make...

Dieser Beitrag enthält drei Kurzartikel. Der erste behandelt die Wirtschaftspolitik, der zweite die Soziale Sicherung. Der dritte skizziert den Ansatz der Ökonomischen Ethik, ein Forschungsprogramm, das in jüngster Zeit auch unter der Bezeichnung "Ordonomik" vorangetrieben wird. Eingerahmt...

The Social Security "full retirement age" (FRA) is the age at which retirement income benefits are available without reduction for early commencement. Presently, that age is 67 for those born in 1960 or later. This paper is about the unfair and unnecessary threat to reduce Social Security...

In this paper, I investigate how individuals perceive the implicit contribution incentives provided by public pension systems. I use the unique setting of the Spanish public pension system, where self-employed workers are allowed to voluntarily determine the level of their Social Security...

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...

Poor heath, large acute and long-term care medical expenses, and spousal death are significant drivers of impoverishment among retirees. We document these facts and build a rich, overlapping generations model that reproduces them. We use the model to assess the incentive and welfare effects of...

There are two stylised facts, namely weak demand for life-annuities and flat age-wealth profile that contradict the life-cycle hypothesis. In this paper we design a theoretical framework, which combines plausible arguments, which have been put forward in the literature to reconcile theory with...

We ask whether a PAYG-financed social security system is welfare improving in an economy with idiosyncratic and aggregate risk. We argue that interactions between the two risks are important for this question. One is a direct interaction in the form of a countercyclical variance of idiosyncratic...

Estonia is widely regarded as a paramount example for a successful transformation of a socialist economic system to a functioning market economy. Against the backdrop of this positive image which contrasts strongly with the crisis scenarios in Southern Europe the remaining problems of Estonia...