Compensating the dead

Fleurbaey, Marc; Leroux, Marie‐Louise; Ponthière, Grégory

doi:10.1016/j.jmateco.2014.02.003

Cited by 42 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 13 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…But that argument is not convincing: even if no one knows ex ante who will be short-lived and who will be long-lived, it is possible, by reorganizing the life cycle (in terms of consumption profiles and working periods), to minimize the well-being losses for the unlucky short-lived. As shown in Fleurbaey et al (2014Fleurbaey et al ( , 2016, this task can be done by giving up the utilitarian criterion, and by adopting a social criterion that does more justice to the idea of compensating the short-lived.…”

Section: The Ex Post Egalitarian Optimummentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This motivates the use of an alternative social criterion, which gives more weight to the short-lived. Actually, the ex post egalitarian social welfare criterion (see Fleurbaey et al, 2016Fleurbaey et al, , 2014 gives absolute priority to the worst off individual in realized terms (rather than in expected terms). Within our model, the worst off in realized terms is, under general conditions, the short-lived (i.e., individuals who die before reaching the old age).…”

Section: The Ex Post Egalitarian Optimummentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, it is related to the literature on retirement and distribution (Cremer & Pestieau, 2011;Schokkaert & Van Parijs, 2003;Schokkaert et al, 2017), which focuses on standard retirement, unlike this paper, which also examines reverse retirement. Second, this paper is also related to the literature on fairness and compensation under unequal lifetime (see Fleurbaey & Ponthiere, 2013;Fleurbaey et al, 2016Fleurbaey et al, , 2014. Fleurbaey et al…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A theory of reverse retirement

Ponthière

2020

J Public Economic Theory

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The retirement system is usually regarded as giving a fair reward for a long working career. However, only workers who have a sufficiently long life benefit from that reward, but not workers who die prematurely. To re‐examine the fairness of retirement systems under unequal lifetime, this paper compares standard retirement (i.e., individuals work before being retired) with—hypothetical—reverse retirement (i.e., individuals are retired before working). We show that, under standard assumptions, an economy with reverse retirement, once in place, converges towards a unique stationary equilibrium. At the normative level, we show that, when labor productivity declines with age, reverse retirement cannot be optimal under the utilitarian criterion (unlike standard retirement), whereas reverse retirement can be optimal under the ex post egalitarian criterion (giving priority to the worst‐off in realized terms). Finally, we show that there exists a set of policy instruments that allow a government to organize a successful transition from standard to reverse retirement.

show abstract

Section: The Ex Post Egalitarian Optimummentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Ex Post Egalitarian Optimummentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A theory of reverse retirement

Ponthière

2020

J Public Economic Theory

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We assume in the following that living longer is preferable. 7 Di¤erentiating U ij with respect tò i , we have:…”

Section: The Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We provide this alternative expression in terms of earnings from prolonged activity to enable comparison with traditional marginal tax rates on income, usually comprised between 0 and 1. 7 This is a standard assumption for developed countries and it does not necessarily apply in societies where lifetime resources are scarce. It also implies that such an additional year would be relatively healthy.…”

Section: The Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harsh occupations, life expectancy and social security

Racionero

2016

Economic Modelling

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Should pension provisions di¤er by occupation? We study the optimality of allowing the pension policies to di¤er by occupation when individuals di¤er in longevity and occupation, longevity is private information but occupation is observable. There is a case for di¤erentiating the pension policy by occupation when longevity is (imperfectly) correlated with occupation. The short-lived workers in the safe occupation are however made worse-o¤, more so when the social objective includes a higher social weight on short-lived individuals to redress the implicit bias towards long-lived that the unweighted utilitarian objective entails. The maximin criterion ensures equal utility for short-lived workers regardless of occupation but those in the safe occupation consume the most when young, the least when old and retire the earliest. This is achieved by taxing-often quite heavily-their savings and their earnings from prolonged activity.

show abstract

The optimal design of assisted reproductive technologies policies

Leroux,

Pestieau,

Ponthiere

2024

Health Economics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper studies the optimal fiscal treatment of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in an economy where individuals differ in their reproductive capacity (or fecundity) and in their wage. We find that the optimal ART tax policy varies with the postulated social welfare criterion. Utilitarianism redistributes only between individuals with unequal fecundity and wages but not between parents and childless individuals. To the opposite, ex post egalitarianism (which gives absolute priority to the worst‐off in realized terms) redistributes from individuals with children toward those without children, and from individuals with high fecundity toward those with low fecundity, so as to compensate for both the monetary cost of ART and the disutility from involuntary childlessness resulting from unsuccessful ART investments. Under asymmetric information and in order to solve for the incentive problem, utilitarianism recommends to either tax or subsidize ART investments of low‐fecundity‐low‐productivity individuals at the margin, depending on the degree of complementarity between fecundity and ART in the fertility technology. On the opposite, ex post egalitarianism always recommends marginal taxation of ART.

show abstract

Compensating the dead

Cited by 42 publications

References 13 publications

A theory of reverse retirement

A theory of reverse retirement

Harsh occupations, life expectancy and social security

The optimal design of assisted reproductive technologies policies

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About