Households that postpone claiming Social Security benefits are, in effect, making additional purchases of the Social Security annuity and acquiring valuable longevity insurance. This paper investigates the impact of plausible variations of subjective mortality beliefs on the value of delayed...

I examine if the positive correlation between wealth and survivorship has any implications for the progressivity of Social Security's current benefit-earnings rule. Using a general-equilibrium macroeconomic model calibrated to the U.S. economy, I show that the optimal benefit-earnings link for...

We study the impact of a fully-funded social security system in an economy with heterogeneous consumers. The unobservability of individual health conditions leads to adverse selection in the private annuity market. Introducing social security - which is immune to adverse selection - affects...

This paper uses a heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model to examine the fiscal and distributional consequences of introducing a means test in US Social Security. I find that a means test, that is, conditioning benefit payments on a household's earnings or assets, leads to a higher...