Incomplete and highly fragmented work histories threaten to leave many contributors of the pension schemes in Latin America without the minimum pension guarantee or even without access to the ordinary pension. We propose a methodology to assess this risk, identify vulnerable groups and study...

The authors show that labor market policies and institutions affect the effectiveness of economic reform programs. They compare annual growth rates across 119 countries, using data from 449 World Bank adjustment credits and loans between 1980 and 1996. The results indicate that countries with...

Excess distortions in the welfare state might result from the government lack of ability to commit not to help unlucky agents. Incentive considerations that are crucial in standard insurance in the presence of moral hazard play no role in this case. A benevolent government that sets transfers...

Benevolent governments lacking commitment ability provide too much insurance, if opportunistic private agents free ride on the government's concern and exert too little effort expecting government assistance. Yet, the costs of implementing the transfer policy work as a commitment device,...

The goal of this paper is to present the simulation model used in a research on the macroeconomic effects of the law 16.713 that reforms the Uruguayan social security system. It is a version of the overlapping generation models that have been extensively used for the analysis of fiscal and...

Coverage of contributory pension programmes has been quite disappointing in Latin America in the aftermath of the reforms. The question thus arises as to whether non-contributory programmes could fill the gap. Uruguay is atypical in this region in that the proportion of the elderly receiving...

The contribution of government transfer programs to inequality is often assessed by analyzing to what extent the benefits paid go to lower income families. Several analysts have found that some key government transfers actually go mostly to middle and high income families and thus contribute to...

We propose alternative methods to project pension rights and implement them in Chile and Uruguay and partially in Argentina. We use incomplete work histories databases from the social security administrations to project entire lifetime work histories. We first fit linear probability and duration...

In this paper we estimate a structural model for retirement behavior using data on labor history of public employees in Uruguay. We use a modied version of the model proposed by Jimenez-Martin and Sánchez-Martin (2007) adjusted to the uruguayan case. The estimated coeffcient of relative risk...