Over the last couple of decades there have been unprecedented increases in life expectancy which have raised important concerns for retirement savings.

There is now a large body of literature dealing with the political determination of the characteristics of a public pay-as-you-go pension system.The seminal paper by Browning (1975) assumed that the only heterogeneity between voters was their age. Subsequent papers (such as Casamatta et al. (2000a)) have enriched this approach by assuming that agents belonging to the same cohort differ in income or in productivity.

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this pressing open question in public finance, we estimate a life-cycle model in which the optimal employment, retirement and consumption decisions of forward-looking individuals depend, inter alia, on life expectancy and the design of the public pension system.

The main objective of this paper is to estimate labour supply effects of an early retirement programme in Norway. Detailed administrative data are employed in order to characterize full paths towards retirement and account for substitution from other exit routes, such as unemployment and disability insurance.

European studies highlight a widening of relative inequalities in general mortality by socioeconomic status from the 1970s to the 1990s. Few studies are available for Southern European countries; they show that these countries represent an exception to these trends. Available evidence on this for Italy is for a specific city only and nationwide evidence does not exist yet. This paper examines the association between lifetime income and old age mortality risk, referred to as the income–mortality gradient, in Italy during the 1980s and 1990s. We investigate the shape of the gradient. Most importantly, we analyze the evolution of the gradient between these two decades.

Over the past two decades, pension reforms have been at the top of the agenda of social policy makers in Europe. In many countries, these reforms have resulted in less generous public pensions. At the same time, minimum income protection for the elderly has received attention from policy makers, but much less so from social policy researchers.

We study two recent changes in incentives to work facing 67-69 year old workers in Norway: an earnings test reform which increases current earnings from work, and a pension system maturation which removes pension accrual from work. Within a difference-in-differences framework, we exploit these changes to investigate the effects of economic incentives. We find the earnings test reform has large effects, while the pension system maturation has no significant effects. The findings confirm that 67-69 year olds can adjust their work efforts to economic incentives, but do so only to thoses related to current income and not to future pensions.

Despite a welcome reduction in the number of people in later life living in poverty, it remains an issue for a significant minority of older people. Age UK commissioned this qualitative research conducted by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University to explore and understand the experiences of people aged 65 and over living on low incomes, in order to raise awareness about the reality of managing in later life with restricted means.

We set up a three-period overlapping generation model in which young individuals allocate their time to schooling and work, healthy middle aged individuals allocate their time to leisure and work and their income to consumption and savings for retirement, and old age individuals live off their savings. The three period setup allows us to distinguish between longevity and active life expectancy (i.e. the expected length of period 1 and 2). We show that individuals optimally respond to a longer active life by educating more and, if the labor supply elasticity is high enough, by supplying less labor. We calibrate the model to US data and show that the historical evolution of increasing education and declining labor supply can be explained as an optimal response to increasing active life expectancy. We integrate the theory into a unified growth model and reestablish increasing life expectancy as an engine of long-run economic development.

Pensionsåldersutredningens analyser visar att förutsättningarna för äldre att arbeta längre är allt bättre. Det finns åtskilliga hinder som behöver mötas med breda och ömsesidigt förstärkande åtgärder.

Ageing populations and the un-sustainability of public pension arrangements have led governments around the world to rethink their pension systems. One solution is to increase the role of private pensions, either in the form of occupational or personal pension arrangements. As such private pensions increase globally, how to ensure they are effectively and efficiently regulated and supervised becomes an issue of significant importance.