Government authorities use resources on information campaigns in order to inform citizens about relevant policy changes. The motivation is usually that individuals sometimes are ill-informed about the public policies relevant for their choices. In a survey experiment where the treatment group was provided with public information material on the social security system, we assess the short- and medium-term knowledge effects. We show that the short run effects of the information on knowledge disappear completely within 4 months. The findings illustrate the limits of public information campaigns to improve knowledge about relevant policy reforms.

We conduct two randomized control trials designed to understand the role of information and priming on the willingness to retrench the pension system. The first entails a survey to a sample of Portuguese voters, who are randomly presented with a text providing factual information about the public pension system. The second surveys a sample of Portuguese University students, randomly presented with an alternative order of questions. We show that more literacy on the pension system has a positive impact on the individual willingness to support reforms. Given that public opinion is usually seen as an important deterrent of effective action by politicians and that the level of voters’ literacy can be influenced by policy action, this analysis may provide useful insights to policy makers faced with the challenge of reforming existent pension systems. Our analysis also suggests that priming effects should not be ignored, given their impact in individuals in the extremes of the political spectrum.

We study the short-, medium-, and long-run implications of stimulating annuity markets in a dynamic general-equilibrium overlapping-generations model. We find that beneficial partial-equilibrium effects of stimulating annuity markets are counteracted by negative general-equilibrium repercussions. Balancing the positive partial-equilibrium and negative general-equilibrium forces we show that there exists an intermediate level of annuitization such that the lifetime utility of steady-state agents is maximized. Studying the transition to this optimal degree of annuitization shows that currently middle-aged individuals stand to gain most from the stimulation of annuity markets. Complementing our main analysis, we highlight the centrality of the interplay between human-capital accumulation and annuity market policy.

To lower the forecasted increase in the social security burden linked to population aging, delaying the legal age of retirement has been privileged throughout industrialized countries. Compared with a uniform delay, some argue that those who have entered precociously the labor market should be allowed to retire earlier. They assert that such a ‘long career’ exception is all the more justified that those unskilled workers live also less long due to heavier and potentially health-damaging jobs. In this paper, we then study macroeconomic and distributional consequences of global gain in life expectancy, with or without the postponement of the legal age of retirement and with or without a ‘long career’ exception. By considering a framework where individuals decide to acquire skills depending on economic incentives and differential mortality, we focus particularly on spillover effects possibly generated by education. We show in particular that introducing a ‘long career’ exception cannot be to the advantage of future unskilled workers unless education yields no spillover effects.