Life expectancy, heavy work and the return to education: lessons for the social security reform

Gilles Le Garrec (1) , Stéphane Lhuissier (2)

1 OFCE - Observatoire français des conjonctures économiques (Sciences Po)
2 Centre de recherche de la Banque de France

In most industrial countries, while the calculation of pension bene…ts is progressive, public pension systems redistribute weakly from high to low- income earners. They are close to actuarial fairness. This statement results from the following speci…city: less paid jobs are also heavier and health- damaging jobs involving losses in life expectancy. As avoiding low earnings and hard-working conditions require acquisition of skills, we study conjointly in this article the impact of social security and the work-related life expectancy loss on the schooling decision. We then study macroeconomic and distributional consequences of global gain in life expectancy associated with di¤erent social security reforms, focusing particularly on spillover e¤ects possibly generated by education.

Keywords: social security; human capital; inequality

Domains: Economics and Finance; Sociology

Gilles Le Garrec, Stéphane Lhuissier. Life expectancy, heavy work and the return to education: lessons for the social security reform. 2011. ⟨hal-01069511⟩