Social Security faces a major financing shortfall. One policy option for addressing this shortfall would be to raise the earliest age at which individuals can claim their retirement benefits. A welfare analysis of such a policy change depends critically on how it affects living standards. This...

With fixed costs of participating in the stock market, consumers with high income will participate in the stock market, but consumers with lower income will not participate. If a fully-funded defined-contribution social security system tries to exploit the equity premium by selling a dollar of...

We present a detailed analysis of the incentives that Social Security provides for continued work at older ages. We do so using information on older males from the Health and Retirement Study over the 1980-1997 period to calculate the changes in the present discounted value of Social Security...

Pension plan descriptions from respondents to the 1992 Health and Retirement Study are compared with descriptions obtained from their employers. Earnings histories reported by respondents are compared with earnings histories from the Social Security Administration. The probability of linking...

This paper focuses on Social Security benefit claiming behavior, a take-up decision that has been ignored in the previous literature. Using financial calculations and simulations based on an expected utility maximization model, we show that delaying benefit claim for a period of time after...

This paper analyzes the relation of pension coverage and key plan characteristics to measures of union membership and strength, and to related interactions. The large and significant relationships which are found cannot be explained by, and are often inconsistent with, predictions obtained by...

In the presence of uncertain lifetimes, social security has the characteristics of an annuity: a consumer pays a tax when young in exchange for receiving a social security benefit if he survives to be old. If consumers have identical ex ante mortality probabilities, then a fully funded social...

The fact that consumers do not know in advance the dates at which they will die effects their individual consumption and portfolio decisions. In general, some consumers will end up leaving bequests at death, even if they have no bequest motive, simply because they happen to die at a time when...