China has legislated a mixed social security pension system with a defined benefit pay-as-you-go portion and an investment-based defined contribution portion. This paper analyses the economics of these two types of systems in the Chinese context and calculates the advantage to China of using an...

Although there have been several studies of the effect of social security on private saving, there has been no attempt to measure the welfare cost of this distortion. The present paper develops an analytic framework for this evaluation and presents numerical calculations

In a 1974 paper in the Journal of Political Economy I discussed the theoretical ambiguity of the effect of social security on private saving and presented statistical evidence that social security does on balance depress saving. Recently, an error was detected in the computer program that was...

The U.S. Social Security Administration, in cooperation with similar agencies in other countries, recently developed estimates of social security benefits for twelve major industrial countries. The present paper uses these data to estimate the effects of social security benefits on saving and...