Pension taxation has large budgetary and distributional effects, in particular in the light of ageing societies and the importance of pension benefits in old-age income. This paper investigates the impact of taxing public and mandatory occupational old-age pensions in the EU, focusing on both...

The paper examines social security (public pension) reforms in which the programme is partially shifted from a public unfunded basis to a private, prefunded, basis. It focuses on reforms where individuals have a choice in switching from public funded to private unfunded programmes (as in the...

Public pay-as-you-go pensions still form the dominant pillar of old-age provision in Germany. This is in marked contrast to the situation in Anglo-Saxon countries. It has advantages if labour markets are strong, e.g., following a quick recovery from the Great Recession. It has disadvantages, as...

Eine unerwartet steigende Lebenserwartung führt bei privaten kapitalgedeckten Rentenversicherungsverträgen zu sinkenden Rentenzahlungen und/oder einer Belastung des Versicherungsunternehmens, das verschiedene Möglichkeiten hat, dieser Belastung zu entgegnen. Für Deutschland wird anhand der...

This paper examines how families adjust their private old-age savings in response to a change in individual pension wealth. The regression discontinuity approach exploits two expansions of the child care pension benefit, in 1992 and in 1999, as natural experiments. The empirical analysis is...

There exists a wide variety of tax treatments of pensions across the world. And the reasons for such a range of regimes are not clear. This note reviews the general principles of pension taxes and analyses the theoretical foundations of why pension incomes ought to be taxed specifically. To do...

This paper uses stochastic simulations on calibrated models to assess the optimal degree of reliance on fun ded pensions and on a particular type of unfunded (PAYG) pension. Surprisingly little is known about the optimal split between funded and unfunded systems when there are sources of...

This paper estimates the causal effect of income on health outcomes of the elderly and investigates underlying mechanisms by exploiting an income change induced by the launch of China's New Rural Pension scheme (NRPS). Using this policy experiment, we address the endogeneity of pension income by...

Mandatory pension systems only partially replace old-age income, therefore the government also operates a voluntary pension system, where savings are matched by government grants. Accounting for the resulting tax expenditure, our models describe the income flow from shortsighted to farsighted...