The present paper quantifies the importance of family insurance for the analysis of social security. We therefore augment the standard overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic labor productivity and longevity risk in that we account for gender and marital status. We simulate the...

This paper considers the quantitative role of growth in the size of the social security program in contributing to the collapse of personal saving in the U.S. over the last few decades. Using a calibrated, general equilibrium life-cycle model this paper shows that social security may not be to...

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...

Demographic trends in most developed economies are characterized by rising longevity and decreasing birthrates. These trends endanger the sustainability of the current public pension systems. Therefore social security reform proposals are on the agenda in many countries. This paper demonstrates...

Increasing longevity causes an upward trend in the dependency ratio in many countries. This raises concerns about the financial sustainability of social security schemes, and reform initiatives and proposals abound. It is shown that a fundamental policy choice inevitably arises since a given...

We study the sustainability of pension systems using a life-cycle model with distortionary taxation that sets an upper limit to the real value of tax revenues. This limit implies an endogenous threshold dependency ratio, i.e. a point in the cross-section distribution of the population beyond...

A reform of a pay-as-you-go social security makes the pensioners worse off and the working generations better off in the period of the reform (in a dynamically efficient economy without altruism). The observed reluctance across all age groups to support such reforms is usually explained by the...

Since the late 1970s, the price indices underlying the poverty lines in India have been updated using aggregate indices. Widespread criticism of these indices led to the adoption of a new official methodology in 2011 based on unit values from consumption survey data. We propose an alternative...

Most equivalence scales which are applied in research on poverty and inequality do not depend on income, although there is strong empirical evidence that equivalence scales in fact are income dependent. This paper explores the consistency of results derived from income independent and income...