Skill specificity is thought to increase preferences for social insurance (Iversen and Soskice 2001), especially where employment protections are low, notably the United States (Gingrich and Ansell 2012). The compensating differentials literature, by contrast, suggests that neither skill...

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...