This paper shows that an uninsured fully-funded defined-benefit (DL) pension is effectively a defined-contribution (DC) pension invested in a special type of fixed-income security, one that imposes a large amount of diversifiable inflation risk on plan participants and that is apparently...

Being fair to future generations requires that Social Security be reformed in a manner that effectively prefunds a significant share of future Social Security benefit payments. All serious reform plans have this property. Prefunding is attempted exclusively in the Social Security trust fund in...

Being fair to future generations requires that Social Security be reformed in a manner that prefunds a significant share of future Social Security benefit payments. All serious reform plans have this property. Prefunding is done exclusively in the Social Security trust fund in some plans, and it...

This paper assesses the effect of social security privatization on the government budget, economic efficiency, national saving, and the distribution of resources across generations. It is shown that the benefits of privatization most often touted by privatization advocates can be achieved by...

The central thesis of this paper is that defined-benefit (DB) pensions in conjunction with taxpayer-backed DB pension insurance subject pension plan participants and taxpayers to much greater financial risk than current pension funding statistics suggest. Specifically, it is shown that: (i)...

Reviews the current state of research on the relationship between capital gains realization and the capital gains tax rate and offers a theoretical framework to guide future empirical research. Concludes that realizations are probably quite responsive to the tax rate in the short run, but that...

The purpose of this paper it to help better focus the Social Security privatization debate on pertinent issues. It is shown that retirement systems based either on mandatory private retirement accounts or on traditional publicly administered defined benefits can be designed so as to have similar...

Social Security privatization is now receiving much attention in policy circles. Proposed privatization plans range from modest changes in the mix of assets held by the Social Security trust fund to the phased-in replacement of all Social Security benefits and taxes with mandatory Individual...