The labor supply and benefit claiming incentives provided by the early retirement rules of the Social Security Old Age benefits program are of growing importance as the Normal Retirement Age (NRA) increases to 67, the labor force participation of Older Americans rises, and a variety of reforms...

Immigration is having an increasingly important effect on the social insurance system in the United States. On the one hand, eligible legal immigrants have the right to eventually receive pension benefits, but also rely on other aspects of the social insurance system such as health care,...

We build upon the growing literature on financial literacy, which studies the prevalence of lack of knowledge about various financial issues, and analyze how much people know about the Social Security rules using a small pilot survey conducted in 2007, and a follow-up and extended survey funded...

The need for Social Security Reform in the next years is hardly a matter of debate. Therefore, the widespread believe among Americans that Social Security will not be able to pay benefits in the long run at the level that was anticipated, does not come as a surprise. The government acknowledges...

This paper develops a framework to analyze the actuarial adjustments faced by American workers who claim Social Security benefits before or after their Full Retirement Age (FRA). We derive the conditions under which these adjustments are “actuarially fair” (or “neutral”) and develop...