040027 UK The Economic of Pensions (MA) (2015S)

Issues of pensions and retirement are hotly debated in the public arena. Is the pension system stable or do we need further reforms? What is the impact of the demographic development? Should the pay-as-you-go system be substituted by a funded system? What could be done to increase the retirement age?
This course deals with these and with related issues of the economics of retirement from a theoretical, empirical and political perspective. First, we will study central models of the literature (the life-cycle model, the overlapping-generations model), discuss the implications of these models for savings behavior, labor supply and the retirement decision and compare the theoretical predictions with the results from empirical papers. Second, we also plan to cover topics related to risk-sharing and to questions of the intergenerational and intergenerational distribution of pension systems. Finally, the course will also give an overview of the workings, the past reforms and the future challenges of real-world pension systems, in particular of the Austrian and the Swedish system.