Didier Blanchet

Inactivité, travail et formation: quel partage pour les gains d'espérance de vie ?

This paper analyses under which conditions it is desirable to have a proportional sharing of additional years of life between training, work and retirement or other forms of inactivity. We rely on an illustrative model with a continuous representation of age that generates realistic life-cycle profiles. A scenario of increasing life expectancy is combined with various assumptions concerning productivity gains, consumption norms and human capital obsolescence. A homothetic pattern of change for life cycles requires not only parallel evolutions of productivity and consumption norms, but also a rightward shift of human capital depreciation that reflects global changes in mortality. This kind of modelling can also enlighten debates concerning the intragenerational dimensions of the pension debate, i.e. the differentiation of pension rules between people facing different mortality conditions.