The paper considers the effect on widows' poverty of changes in Social Security survivorship benefits, by a reduction in couples' benefits so that total Social Security cost is unchanged. A twenty percent increase in survivorship benefits, for example, would reduce the 1989 poverty rate of...

This paper uses a lifetime framework to address questions about the progressivity of social security and proposed reforms. We use a large sample of diverse individuals from the PSID to calculate lifetime income, to classify individuals into income quintiles, and then to calculate the present...

How much does the current social security system really redistribute from rich to poor? We use the PSID to estimate lifetime wage profiles and actual earnings each year for a sample of 1778 individuals, and we use mortality probabilities to calculate expected payroll taxes and social security...

Building on the existing literature that examines the extent of redistribution in the Social Security system as a whole, this paper focuses more specifically on how Social Security affects the poor. This question is important because a Social Security program that reduces overall inequality by...

This is the introduction and summary to the fourth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. The first phase described the retirement incentives inherent in plan provisions and documented the strong relationship across countries between social...

Demographic change has differential impacts on the welfare of current and future generations. In a simple closed economy, aging -- a relative scarcity of young workers -- increases wages, increasing the welfare of the young. At the same time, population aging will reduce rates of return to...

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...

The option value model developed in an earlier paper is used to simulate the effect on retirement of changes in a firm's pension plan compared to the effect of changes in Social Security provisions. The provisions of the firm's pension plan have a much greater effect than Social Security...