This paper examines the role of work as an incentive device in income maintenance programs in different informational environments. To that end, we make both the income generating ability and the disutility of labor of individuals unobservable, and compare the resulting benefit schedules with...

We study the social, demographic and economic origins of social security. The data for the U.S. and for a cross section of countries suggest that urbanization and industrialization are associated with the rise of social insurance. We describe an OLG model in which demographics, technology, and...

In this paper we present a preliminary estimate of the impact of the recent agreement between the Spanish government and the social partners to reform the public contributive pension system. After updating the projections of pension expenditure constructed in de la Fuente and Doménech (2010)...

In this paper we study the disability transition probabilities (as well as the mortality probabilities) due to concurrent factors to age such as income, gender and education. Although it is well known that aging and socioeconomic status influence the probability of causing functional disorders,...

In this paper, we explore the links between pension reform, early retirement, and the use of unemployment as an alternative pathway to retirement. We use a dynamic rational expectations model to analyze the search and retirement behaviour of employed and unemployed workers aged 50 or over. The...

The objective of this work is to evaluate the impact of a social security system on the well-being of each individual in the economy and to challenge the measures commonly used in this type of policy analysis. We show that measures based on the notion of actuarial fairness do not measure...

This paper develops a simple model that can be used to analyze the long-term sustainability of the contributive pension system and the steady-state response of pension expenditure to changes in some key demographic and economic variables, in the characteristics of the average pensioner and in...

In this paper we explore the distortions that minimum pensions generate on individual decisions, paying special attention to their impact on retirement behavior. This is done with the help of a stylized life-cycle model, which provides a very convenient analytical characterization of the...