A program of Personal Retirement Accounts (PRAs) funded by deposits equal to 2.3 percent of earnings (up to the Social Security maximum) would permit retirees to receive more income in retirement than with the current Social Security program while at the same time making it unnecessary to...

In a 1974 paper in the Journal of Political Economy I discussed the theoretical ambiguity of the effect of social security on private saving and presented statistical evidence that social security does on balance depress saving. Recently, an error was detected in the computer program that was...

This paper, which was presented as the 1979 Frank Paish Lecture to the British Association of University Teachers of Economics, provides a non-technical summary of the recent studies of the effects of social security on private saving. The first section discusses the theoretical indeterminacy of...

The distribution of wealth is one of the most important and least studied features of our economic life. A lack of good data on household wealth is the primary reason for the inadequate attention to this subject. Moreover, the evidence that is available from household surveys and estate records...

Governments around the world have enacted or are currently considering fundamental structural reforms of their Social Security pension programs. The key feature in these reforms is a shift from a pure pay-as-you-go tax-financed system, in which taxes on current workers are primarily distributed...

This paper, a forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Public Economics, reviews the theoretical and empirical issues dealing with Social Security pensions. The first part of the paper discusses pure pay-as-you-go plans. It considers the effects of introducing such a plan on the present value of...

This paper examines the risk aspects of an investment-based defined contribution Social Security plan. We focus on the risk after the plan is fully phased in. Individuals deposit a fraction of wages to a Personal Retirement Account (PRA), invest these funds in a 60:40 equity-debt mix, and in a...

China has legislated a mixed social security pension system with a defined benefit pay-as-you-go portion and an investment-based defined contribution portion. This paper analyses the economics of these two types of systems in the Chinese context and calculates the advantage to China of using an...

We study the growth of Chinese imports into the United States from autarky during 1950-1970 to about 15 percent of overall imports in 2008, taking advantage of the rich heterogeneity in trade policy and trade growth across products during this period. Central to our analysis is an accounting for...

We use the dynamics of U.S. imports across goods in the period around the U.S.-China trade war with a model of exporter dynamics to estimate the dynamic path of the probability of transiting between Normal Trade Relations and a trade war state. We find (i) there was no increase in the likelihood...