Intergenerational redistribution and risk sharing with changing longevity

Trend increases in longevity are a global phenomenon challenging the fiscal sustainability of current welfare arrangements. Policy proposals abound and often build on implicit assertions concerning intergenerational equity. This paper offers a simple but manageable OLG model with endogenous retirement and cohort-specific longevity to address intergenerational redistribution and risk sharing. While it is well known that a utilitarian planner strives for consumption smoothing, it is shown that healthy ageing calls for work smoothing in the sense that retirement ages increase with longevity. Hence, cohorts with higher longevity should contribute to their larger consumption needs via later retirement, although it is shown that the planner still front-loads some financing (pre-saving). Stochastic longevity raises the issue of intergenerational risk sharing, which implies that cohorts turning out to have a high longevity are compensated at the expense of cohorts turning out to have a relatively short longevity.