The effect of social security and other forms of government debt on national savings is one of the most widely debated policy questions in economics today. Some estimates suggest that social security has reduced U.S. savings by almost forty percent. This paper examines recent cross-section and...

This is the introduction to and summary of the second stage of a international research project to study the relationship between social security provisions and retirement. The project relies on the analyses of a large group of economists in 12 countries who conduct the analysis for each of...

Typical neoclassical life-cycle models predict that Social Security has a large and negative effect on private savings. We review this theoretical literature by constructing a model where individuals face uninsurable longevity risk and differ by wage earnings, while Social Security provides...

This paper calculates monthly time series for the overall safety net's statutory marginal labor income tax rate as a function of skill and marital status. Marginal tax rates increased significantly for all groups between 2007 and 2009, and dramatically so for unmarried household heads. The...

"In this paper we develop an empirical model of entrepreneurs' business continuation decisions, and we estimate its parameters using a new panel of monthly alcohol tax returns from bars in the state of Texas. In our data, entrepreneurial failure is frequent and predictable. In the first year of...

"This paper empirically examines the effects of market size on producers' sizes in retail trade industries with many producers. A robust prediction of oligopoly theory is that larger markets are more competitive and have lower price-cost markups. Because producers in more competitive markets...

"We calibrate a model of labor demand to infer the employment responseto a change in the minimum wage in the food away from home industry. Assuming a perfectly competi- tive labor market, the model predicts a 2.5 to 3.5 percent fall in employment in response to a 10 percent minimum wage change....