This paper examines policies to index Social Security taxes or benefits to changes in the ratio of workers to beneficiaries, allowing for auto-correction for changing demographic factors.

Social investing, by both the political left and right, frequently ends up hurting the very people--particularly the economically disadvantaged--that it is supposed to help.

Few realize how bad the federal government's finances are, because most evaluations are based on what happened in the past--not what is likely to happen in the future.

In a stochastic economy with overlapping generations, fiscal policy affects the allocation of aggregate risks. The paper shows how to compute the welfare effects of marginal policy changes that shift risk across cohorts, in general and for an application to social security equity investments. I...

This paper studies the optimal trade-off between commitment and flexibility in an intertemporal consumption/savings choice model. Individuals expect to receive relevant information regarding their own situation and tastes - generating a value for flexibility - but also expect to suffer from...

How far is the US social insurance system from an efficient system? We answer this question within a model where agents receive idiosyncratic, labor-productivity shocks that are privately observed. When social security and income taxation comprise the social insurance system, the maximum...