Pension Systems in Comparison

While visiting CESifo, Niku Määttänen will be working with Essi Eerola and Panu Poutvaara on a project that explores the distributional effects of different types of pension schemes in a life-cycle setting with idiosyncratic labour income shocks and savings. They will compare alternative pension systems in terms of both expected and realised lifetime utilities.

Most of Mr Määttänen's research is related to taxation, pensions and housing markets. His ongoing research projects include a study of the Laffer Curve on housing transaction taxes, distributional effects of consumption taxation in the presence of housing wealth as well as the distributional effects of alternative pension reform options in Finland.

Niku Määttänen often works with quantitative, heterogonous agent models. He recently developed, together with Essi Eerola, a model of the housing market that features both matching and credit frictions. In another project, they developed an assignment model of the housing market to study the relation between income and house price distributions.

Mr. Määttänen is currently working as research director in the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA) in Helsinki. He is also adjunct professor at Aalto University where he teaches regularly. He is presently the project coordinator for a Horizon 2020 research project on fiscal coordination in the EU.