This paper examines Social Security contribution dynamics in Portugal during 2019–2024 using granular administrative records. It assesses contributors, earnings, and effective rates to disentangle drivers of revenue across demographic groups and sectors, emphasizing fiscal implications. The main finding is that revenue growth was propelled chiefly by rising earnings, with additional support from higher employment, lifting the contribution‑to‑GDP ratio. Ageing continues to dampen medium‑term prospects, but recent immigration temporarily offsets this by expanding contributors in prime ages; however, lower average earnings among foreign workers limit near‑term fiscal payoffs despite their stronger attachment to the general regime. Gender gaps are modest overall yet fiscally relevant: faster female earnings growth boosts revenue and indicates potential medium‑term gains from continued convergence. Sectorally, contributions are increasingly concentrated in services, particularly high‑skill activities, while compositional shifts within industry reduce average yields. Overall, administrative contribution data are crucial for gauging revenue sustainability and guiding public finance policy.

I study a Danish reform that links social security eligibility to life expectancy and postpones eligibility for some cohorts. Exact birth-date cutoffs create discontinuities that identify causal effects. Using administrative records linked to a survey on retirement expectations, I estimate that a six-month delay raises labor force participation by about 20 percentage points three months after the cutoff, with much larger effects among individuals with low occupational pension wealth. I measure treatment intensity by computing average social security payments during the six-month ineligibility window. These payments fall only modestly across the pension-wealth distribution, so differential incidence explains only part of the gradient. Scaling reduced-form effects by group-specific social security wealth, I find that low-wealth individuals remain more responsive per euro of foregone benefits. Delaying eligibility by half a year yields a net fiscal gain of about EUR 8.4k per affected individual, concentrated among low-wealth groups.

This paper investigates the effects of the public pension earnings test on the labor supply of the elderly in South Korea. Exploiting the unique feature of the 2015 National Pension reform, which significantly relaxed the earnings test for those pensioners who were born on and after July 29, 1954, we estimate the causal effects of the earnings test on elderly labor supply using a regression discontinuity design based on administrative and survey data. Our findings from administrative data indicate that the reform of the earnings test has increased employment by 4 to 5 percentage points. Furthermore, the findings from the survey data indicate that the reform increased the average weekly working hours by approximately 3 hours. These labor supply responses were greater for those with higher pension benefits and those with college or higher education.

This paper investigates the trade-off between insurance and incentives in pension benefit design by comparing the distributional and distortionary impacts of means- and earnings-tested pension benefits before and after retirement. I use reform-induced variation in retirement options and saving possibilities to document the distributional effects of means- and earnings-testing and estimate the behavioral effects on individuals' labor supply and saving decisions of the resulting high effective marginal tax rates.