Variable Retirement and the Effects of Social Insurance on Savings, Wealth, and Welfare

Stephen J Turnovsky () and Neil Bruce

No 2007-5, Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy

Abstract: We construct a Blanchard-style overlapping generations model consisting of long-lived individuals who have uninsurable idiosyncratic risk resulting from uncertain retirement periods and medical costs in retirement. Without social insurance, such individuals must save for these eventualities. We examine the impact of pay-as-you-go social insurance policies (public pensions and medicare coverage) on individual and aggregate consumption, saving, and wealth levels as well as wealth distribution. We also derive expressions for optimal (Pareto improving) social insurance policies.

JEL-codes: D91 J20 E10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dge, nep-ias and nep-mac
Date: 2007
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics-ejournal.org/economics/discussionpapers/2007-5 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifwedp:5519

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ZBW - German National Library for Economics ().