Optimal Health and Retirement Policy Under Biologically Founded Human Ageing

该项目将生物学基础上的个人衰老过程纳入现代宏观经济学，将其理解为身体和精神功能的随机和个人特定恶化。新的模型使得有可能从理论上和定量研究健康和退休政策对年轻人和老年人的收入分配和健康的影响。特别是，它使我们能够搜索公共（或公共监管）保险系统的（约束）最优设计，即公民在无知之幕后面更喜欢的保险系统。在他们自己的生活史被揭示之前。这些结果反过来有助于评估当前的公共保险政策（在德国或瑞士）是否将人类生命周期合理地划分为工作和退休，以及它是否为年轻人和老年人提供了过多或过少的医疗保健。

This project integrates into modern macroeconomics a biologically founded process of individual ageing, understood as the stochastic and individual-specific deterioration of the functioning of body and mind. The new modeling makes it possible to investigate theoretically and quantitatively the effects of health and retirement policy on the distribution of income and health of the young and elderly. In particular it allows us to search for the (constrained-) optimal design of the public (or publicly regulated) insurance system that citizens would prefer behind the veil of ignorance, i.e.\ before their own life history is revealed. These results in turn are helpful in order to assess whether current public insurance policy (in Germany or Switzerland) establishes a desirable division of the human life cycle into work and retirement and whether it provides too much or too little health care for the young and for the elderly.