The aggregate matching (hiring) function relates gross hires to labor market tightness. Decompositions of aggregate hires show how the hiring process differs across different groups of workers and of firms. Decompositions include employment status in the previous month, age, gender and...

Whenever unemployment stays high for an extended period, it is common to see analyses, statements, and rebuttals about the extent to which the high unemployment is structural, not cyclical. This essay views the Beveridge Curve pattern of unemployment and vacancy rates and the related matching...

Pension benefit rules depend on individual history far more than taxes do, and age plays a much larger role in pension determination than in tax determination. Apart from some simulation studies, theoretical studies of optimal tax design typically contain neither a mandatory pension system nor...

This article, based on two books (Barr and Diamond 2008, forthcoming), sets out a series of principles for pension design rooted in economic theory: pension systems have multiple objectives, analysis should consider the pension system as a whole, analysis should be framed in a second-best...

The traditional starting place for a study of tax reform is a definition of an ideal tax base, which is then adjusted in light of additional issues. After arguing briefly that this is not a good starting place, the essay reviews the optimal taxation literature inferences for tax base policy,...

This comment was written for a special issue of the Journal of Public Economics which contains papers written for a conference. The papers cover a range of topics and approaches in behavioral economics, including issues of individual behavior, of the measurement of the consequences of individual...

Advancing annuity demand theory, we present sufficient conditions for the optimality of full annuitization under market completeness that are substantially less restrictive than those used by Yaari (1965). We examine demand with market incompleteness, finding that positive annuitization remains...

After presenting the Gruber-Wise analysis showing a strong effect on retirement of implicit taxes from pension rules, it is shown that there is no effect of these implicit taxes on unemployment. This supports the argument for avoiding high implicit taxes on continued work. Also discussed are...

This essay describes the current debate on reforming Social Security in the US, along with a brief description of how the program works. Along the way it comments on the quality of some proposed reform proposals as well as their political standing. Where issues are similar, some inferences are...