Declining labor force participation of older men throughout the 20th century and recent increases in participation have generated substantial interest in understanding the effect of public pensions on retirement. The National Bureau of Economic Research's International Social Security (ISS) Project, a long-term collaboration among researchers in a dozen developed countries, has explored this and related questions. The project employs a harmonized approach to conduct within-country analyses that are combined for meaningful cross-country comparisons. The key lesson is that the choices of policy makers affect the incentive to work at older ages and these incentives have important effects on retirement behavior.

This special issue of the Journal of Demographic Economics contains 10 contributions to the academic literature all dealing with longevity risk and capital markets. Draft versions of the papers were presented at Longevity 16: The Sixteenth International Longevity Risk and Capital Markets Solutions Conference that was held in Helsingør near Copenhagen on 13–14 August 2021. It was hosted by PerCent at Copenhagen Business School and the Pensions Institute at City, University of London.

It is well-known that marital status is an important predictor for life expectancy. However, non-married individuals are often misclassified as singles which ignores the heterogeneity within the group. This paper shows the importance of distinguishing between types of singles, and in particular whether they are cohabiting, when predicting life expectancies. We use unique and detailed longitudinal register data to track marital status throughout the individual's lifetime. We find that all types of singles consistently benefit from living with a spouse, i.e., after divorce, becoming widower or being never married. This result holds for both men and women. For certain types of cohabiting singles we reject significant differences in life expectancy compared to married individuals. Finally, we use a case study to show that, like married individuals, all types of singles that cohabit also serve as informal caregivers and have the potential to limit the end-of-life long-term care expenditure levels.

The Danish and the Dutch pension systems are often referred to as “among the best in the world”. We compare pension systems and pension products in Denmark and The Netherlands. We focus on the shifts that have taken place in both countries, from pension products with relatively low levels of risk for the participant to pension products with more risk but also higher expected return. We end by drawing lessons that are relevant for discussions in many countries.

We introduce a new modelling framework to explain socio-economic differences in mortality in terms of an affluence index that combines information on individual wealth and income. The model is illustrated using data on older Danish males over the period 1985–2012 reported in the Statistics Denmark national register database. The model fits the historical mortality data well, captures their key features, generates smoothed death rates that allow us to work with a larger number of sub-groups than has previously been considered feasible, and has plausible projection properties.