Australia’s retirement income system is regarded by some as among the best in the world. It has achieved high individual saving rates and broad coverage at reasonably low cost to the government. Australia’s system does have shortcomings. It is heavily dependent on defined contribution plans and is vulnerable to weaknesses in such programs. Its government old-age pension is a means-tested benefit, which creates potentially troublesome incentives for workers with defined contribution accounts.

Americans’ retirement security increasingly depends on how much they save during their working years. One impediment to making good saving decisions may be a lack of knowledge on how saving translates into income in retirement. To address this issue, the U.S. Congress has considered whether to require 401(k) plans to project the value of a lifetime annuity that the participant could purchase at retirement given his current savings. By explicitly showing the connection between saving and income in retirement, the hope is that workers will generally make better saving decisions.

In this paper, we use a recent policy change in the Netherlands to study how changes in search requirements for the older unemployed affect their transition rates to employment, early retirement and sickness/disability benefits. The reform, becoming effective on January 1st 2004, required the elderly to formally report their job search efforts to the employment office in order to avoid a (temporary) cut in benefits. Before the new law was passed, unemployed were allowed to stop all search activity at the moment they turned 57.5.

This thesis consists of two chapters. In the first chapter, we are primarily interested in the effect of expectations on psychological well-being of Americans over age 50 and their spouses. In order to circumvent mood effects on both independent and dependent variables, we devise an exogenous proxy for life expectancy of parents. Using the life table survival probabilities, we examine the effect of expectations on psychological well-being and conclude whether psychological well-being is a forward- looking phenomenon in this context.

Automatic enrolment will see millions of people saving into a private pension for the first time and will make pension saving the norm. However, without further reform, automatic enrolment will create up to 50 million dormant pension pots by 2050.

Early retirement schemes and disability insurance in the Netherlands have both been reformed during the past decades. The reforms have increased incentives to continue working and have decreased the substitution between early retirement and disability.

Supporting pensioners has been a key Government priority since coming to office: enshrined in the coalition agreement is the commitment to protect the basic State Pension by the triple lock – increasing its value by the highest of price inflation, earnings growth or 2.5 per cent.

We use historical data on investment returns and labour income from sixteen countries to quantify the value and risk of defined contribution pension plans, building frequency distributions of pension fund and pension replacement ratios for each country.

We analyze expectations of the Dutch population of ages 25 and older concerning the future generosity state and occupational pensions, the two main pillars of the Dutch pension system.Since the summer of 2006, monthly survey data were collected on the expectations of Dutch households concerning purchasing power of occupational pensions, eligibility and purchasing power of old age social security benefits, and the average retirement age ten or twenty years from now.

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.

This paper explores how extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits targeted to older workers affect early retirement and social welfare. The trade-off of optimal UI between consumption smoothing and moral hazard requires accounting for the entire early retirement system, which often includes extended UI and relaxed access to disability insurance (DI).