The Social Protection Committee (SPC) is the main forum for exchanging information and best practices among the member states within the framework of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the fields of social protection and social inclusion. This implies that looking at how and when the SPC...

In this paper we explore whether the constitutional text has any practical meaning for welfare policy. To examine the empirical importance of the constitution, we first constructed for 68 countries an index of constitutional commitment to social security in five areas: Old Age, disability and...

A well‐established result in the literature is that Social Security reduces steady state welfare in a standard life cycle model. However, less is known about the historical quantitative effects of the program on agents who were alive when the program was adopted. In a computational life cycle...