Life expectancy, human capital, social security and growth

We analyze the e¤ects of changes in the mortality rate upon life expectancy, education, retirement age, human capital and growth in the presence of social secu-rity. We build a vintage growth, overlapping generations model in which individuals choose the time length of education and retirement age, and where unfunded social security pensions depend on workerspast contributions. Social security has a pos-itive e¤ect on education, but pension bene\u85ts favor reductions in retirement age. The net e¤ect is that starting from a benchmark case, higher life expectancies give rise to lower growth rates in the presence of social security as the share of active population is reduced. In addition, higher social security contribution rates reduce the growth rate