Laurie S. M. Reijnders

A TRAGEDY OF ANNUITIZATION? LONGEVITY INSURANCE IN GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM

We construct a tractable discrete-time overlapping generations model of a closed economy and use it to study government redistribution of accidental bequests and private annuities in general equilibrium. Individuals face longevity risk as there is a positive probability of passing away before the retirement period. We find non-pathological cases where it is better for long-run welfare to waste accidental bequests than to give them to the elderly. Next we study the introduction of a perfectly competitive life insurance market offering actuarially fair annuities. There exists a tragedy of annuitization: although full annuitization of assets is privately optimal it is not socially beneficial due to adverse general equilibrium repercussions.

Longevity Shocks with Age-Dependent Productivity Growth

The aim of this paper is to study the long-run effects of a longevity increase on individual decisions about education and retirement, taking macroeconomic repercussions through endogenous factor prices and the pension system into account. We build a model of a closed economy inhabited by overlapping generations of finitely-lived individuals whose labour productivity depends on their age through the build-up of labour market experience and the depreciation of human capital. We make two contributions to the literature on the macroeconomics of population ageing. First we show that it is important to recognize that a longer life need not imply a more productive life and that this matters for the affordability of an unfunded pension system. Second, we find that factor prices could move in a direction opposite to the one accepted as conventional wisdom following an increase in longevity, depending on the corresponding change in the age-productivity profile.

Wealth, wages and wedlock: Explaining the college gender gap reversal

In this paper, I study the role of changes in the wage structure and expectations about marriage in explaining the college gender gap reversal. With strongly diminishing marginal utility of wealth and in the presence of a gender wage gap, single women have a greater incentive than single men to invest in education. Marriage‐market distortions tend to depress the overall benefit of education for women relative to men. I develop a tractable two‐period model and parameterize it using US census data for the cohort born in 1950. I then show that it can generate a reversal and that the most important driving force for this is the decline in marriage rates.