Social Security provides spousal benefits in retirement to secondary workers in married couples based on the primary worker's earnings record. In addition, Social Security pays spousal benefits to divorced secondary workers whose marriages lasted at least ten years. However, if a marriage failed...

Implicit taxes in Social Security, which measure Social Security contributions net of benefits accrued as a percentage of earnings, tend to increase over the life cycle. In this paper, we examine the effects of three potential policy changes on implicit Social Security tax rates: extending the...

Social Security retirement benefits can be claimed at any age between 62 and 70, with delayed claiming resulting in larger monthly payments. In Shoven and Slavov (2013), we show that claiming later increases the present value of lifetime benefits for most individuals. However, this has not...

Social Security benefits may be commenced at any time between ages 62 and 70. As individuals who claim later can, on average, expect to receive benefits for a shorter period, an actuarial adjustment is made to the monthly benefit to reflect the age at which benefits are claimed. In earlier work...

This paper presents a computable general equilibrium model that simulates the effects on employment, output, wages, and economic efficiency of introducing comparable worth into the U.S. economy. The model calculates economy-wide aggregate impacts and disaggregated results for individuals grouped...

Using a general equilibrium model of the United States economy,we examine the combined welfare cost of all taxes in the U.S. revenue system.We find that the welfare losses caused by distortionary taxation can be very large, both on average and at the margin.The marginal welfare loss to consumers...

This paper examines the welfare consequences of changing the current U.S. income tax system to a progressive consumption tax. We compute a sequence of single period equilibria in which savings decisions depend on the expected future return to capital. In the presence of existing income taxes,...

We examine optimal retirement saving for young adults in a life cycle model. We find that for liquidity-constrained young adults who anticipate significant earnings growth, optimal retirement saving is zero. Specifically, we find that with a plausible wage profile for college-educated workers,...