Social security programs generally seek to provide insurance and to reduce poverty and inequality. Providing insurance requires little redistribution. But reducing inequality and alleviating poverty do require redistribution. To reduce inequality, programs must redistribute income, but...

This paper seeks to estimate the distributive impact of the taxes and other fiscal contributions that finance social security in Brazil. Making a certain number of strong hypotheses relative to the fiscal incidence of social security financing, we compute a measure of incidence that aggregates...

Differences in life expectancy between high and low socioeconomic groups are often large and have widened recently in many countries. Such longevity gaps affect the actuarial fairness and progressivity of public pension systems. However, behavioral responses to longevity and policy complicate...

The German Federal Government has expanded subsidies for employees with low gross wages (midijob employees) as of January 1, 2023, and raised the upper earnings limit to 2,000 euros. As a result, around 6.2 million midijob employees will benefit from paying reduced social security contributions...

This paper examines several aspects of Israel's restructured retirement benefits system, focusing on distributive effects. We characterize 10 stylized representative prototypes of Israeli households, reflecting common demographic, wage and employment profiles. These prototypes are used to...

This article explores how faster rates of wage growth for college graduates than for nongraduates could affect the Social Security benefits of future retirees. Using a Social Security Administration microsimulation model called Modeling Income in the Near Term, the authors estimate the effect of...

Over the last three decades, earnings have grown faster for college graduates than for workers without a 4-year college degree. Such wage-growth differentials could affect the Social Security benefits and other retirement income of future retirees. A Social Security Administration...

Recent influential work finds large increases in inequality in the U.S., based on measures of wealth concentration that notably exclude the value of social insurance programs. This paper revisits this conclusion by incorporating Social Security retirement benefits into measures of wealth...

Economic inequality in America continues to grow, taking on ever greater economic and political importance. The reasons for increasing inequality are complex and widely debated, as are potential policies to address it. This paper focuses on a vital but unrecognized part of the story: how the...