The Social Security system contains many features designed to provide an adequate retirement income for familes, rather than just individual retired workers. The most important of these features is the spousal benefit, under which secondary earners are entitled to receive a monthly payment of 50...

Government policies that are based on age do not adjust to changes in remaining life expectancy and lower mortality risk relative to earlier time periods due to improvements in mortality. We examine four possible methods for adjusting the eligibility ages for Social Security, Medicare, and...

Social Security is widely believed to protect its recipients from inflation because benefits are indexed to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). However, the CPI-W may not accurately reflect the experience of retirees for two reasons. First, retirees...

Across countries, government expenditures tend to favor the elderly. This paper provides a political economy explanation for this phenomenon. I consider the classic problem of dividing a fixed payoff in an overlapping generations setting. Any share of the payoff can be given to any generation....