This is the introduction and summary to the fifth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. The first phase described the retirement incentives inherent in plan provisions and documented the strong relationship across countries between social...

This paper presents the results of a field experiment in which a sample of older workers was randomized between a treatment group that was given information about key Social Security provisions and a control group that was not. The experiment was designed to examine whether it is possible to...

This is the introduction and summary to the fourth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. The first phase described the retirement incentives inherent in plan provisions and documented the strong relationship across countries between social...

This is the introduction and summary to the eighth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. This project, which compares the experiences of a dozen developed countries, was launched in the mid 1990s following decades of decline in the labor force...

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...

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...

The social security program will pay benefits of more than $100 billion in 1978. Public transfers on this scale are large enough to have profound effects on the behavior of the U.S. economy. The most important effect, although not the only one, is likely to be the impact of social security on...

The U.S. Social Security Administration, in cooperation with similar agencies in other countries, recently developed estimates of social security benefits for twelve major industrial countries. The present paper uses these data to estimate the effects of social security benefits on saving and...

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 populations in all industrialized countries are aging rapidly and life life expectancies are increasing. Yet older workers are leaving the labor force at younger and younger ages. In some countries, the labor force participation rates of 60 to 64 year old men have fallen by 75% over the past...