This paper studies how the rates of deduction for early retirement have to be determined in pay-as-you-go (PAYG) systems in order to keep their budget stable. The derivation of these deductions requires the use of a multiperiod intertemporal budget constraint that involves assumptions about the retirement behavior of past, present, and future cohorts. In general, it is not possible to calculate budget-neutral deductions from the budget constraint of a single individual who retires before the target retirement age—an approach that dominates the related literature. Only for specific cases one can use this second approach but then one has to adjust the discount rate to the assumption about collective retirement. If there is only one deviating individual, then the right choice is the market interest rate while for a stationary retirement distribution it is the internal rate of return of the PAYG system. In this case, the necessary deductions are lower than under the standard approach. This is also true for retirement ages that fluctuate randomly around a stationary distribution. Various long-run developments (e.g., increases in life expectancy or permanent changes in the average retirement age) might cause challenges for the sustainability of the pension system. These developments, however, can only be dealt with by adequate adjustments to the basic pension formulas and not by the use of deduction rates.

Under dynamic efficiency, a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension scheme helps the current generation of retirees but hurts future generations because they are forced to save via a return-dominated scheme. Abandoning it is deemed welfare-improving but typically not for all generations. But what if agents are present-biased (hence, undersave for retirement) and the “paternalistically motivated forced savings” component of a PAYG scheme motivated its existence in the first place? This paper shows it is possible to transition from such a PAYG scheme on to a higher return, mandated fully-funded scheme; yet, no generation is hurt in the process. The results inform the debate on policy design of pension systems as more and more policy makers push for the transition to take place but are forced to recognize that current retirees may get hurt along the way.

This article analyzes the effect of international migration on the wage gap between women and men who remain in Mexico. We use historical distance to the U.S. border over early twentieth-century railroad networks as an exogenous factor causing changes in the relative supply of men and women, due to predominately male migration. A 10% decrease in the relative labor supply of men tends to increase the wage gap between women and men by approximately 1.1 percentage points, suggesting that they are not perfect substitutes. However, the results imply a greater elasticity of substitution between men and women than that suggested by previous studies.

We study the link between residential segregation and fertility for the socially excluded and marginalized Roma ethnic minority. Using original survey data we collected in Serbia, we investigate whether fertility differs between ethnically homogeneous and mixed neighborhoods. Our results show that Roma in less-segregated areas tend to have significantly fewer children (around 0.8). Most of the difference arises from Roma in less-segregated areas waiting substantially more after having a boy than their counterparts in more-segregated areas. We exploit variation in the share of Serbian sounding first names to provide evidence that a mechanism at play is a shift in preferences toward lower fertility and sons rather than daughters induced by a higher exposure to the Serbian majority culture.

We investigate gender differences across multiple dimensions after 3 months of the first UK lockdown of March 2020, using an online sample of approximately 1,500 Prolific respondents’ residents in the UK. We find that women's mental health was worse than men along the four metrics we collected data on, that women were more concerned about getting and spreading the virus, and that women perceived the virus as more prevalent and lethal than men did. Women were also more likely to expect a new lockdown or virus outbreak by the end of 2020, and were more pessimistic about the contemporaneous and future state of the UK economy, as measured by their forecasted contemporaneous and future unemployment rates. We also show that between earlier in 2020 before the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic and June 2020, women had increased childcare and housework more than men. Neither the gender gaps in COVID-19-related health and economic concerns nor the gender gaps in the increase in hours of childcare and housework can be accounted for by a rich set of control variables. Instead, we find that the gender gap in mental health can be partially accounted for by the difference in COVID-19-related health concerns between men and women.