We present descriptive statistics on pension participation and types of pensions among married couples, using data from the 1996/2008 Panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation and Social Security administrative records. Previous research has focused on pension coverage by marital status, but has not examined couples as a unit. Because couples usually share income, viewing them as...

I investigate the relationship between widowhood and the financial situation among women aged 50 and above in Europe. The results of the paper are based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, and its retrospective third wave (SHARELIFE). Using retrospective data makes it possible to analyze the dynamics of the adverse effects of widowhood. I estimate both the short run and lo...

Indicators of the sustainability of fiscal policies play an important role in the conduct of the international surveillance of fiscal policies. The construction of these indicators, however, is beset with serious problems. To illustrate, many authors have observed that conventional measures of public debt are potentially misleading indicators of public wealth and the effects of fiscal policy on...

Pension systems are core institutional arrangements that are expected to be stable and reliable over consecutive generations. Nevertheless, reforms in pension provision intensified over the past decades, with several countries opting for privatisation of their pension system. We ask which factors lead governments to privatise pension systems and focus on economic crises and different facets of ...

This article inaugurates a biennial series of reports on the income of persons aged 55 and older. The survey on which it is based updates information on the broad economic picture for a cross-section of this population and forms the basis for an analysis of trends in the financial status of the group as a whole. In 1976, persons aged 55--61 were generally working full-time, not receiving income...

Longitudinal studies of white female headship over the past few decades do not find significant welfare effects but do find a positive relationship between state fixed effects and welfare benefit levels. In other words, although white female headship does not respond to the year-to-year changes in welfare benefit levels, states with the most generous welfare benefits tend to be the states with ...

In a two-period model with agent heterogeneity we analyze a pension reform toward a stronger link between contributions and benefits (as recently observed in several countries) in a pension system with a Bismarckian and a Beveridgian component. We show that such a policy change reduces the educational level in an economy. The life expectancy differential between skilled and unskilled individual...

This study employs an overlapping generations model to analyze the effect of public pension levels on economic variables when labor supply elderly is determined endogenously. paper focuses effects a funded scheme economy as well pay-as-you-go (PAYG) scheme. First, impact expansion pensions capital–labor ratio analyzed. It shown that increases ratio, which contrasted with fact PAYG neutral ratio...