The contribution of government transfer programs to inequality is often assessed by analyzing to what extent the benefits paid go to lower income families. Several analysts have found that some key government transfers actually go mostly to middle and high income families and thus contribute to...

Most public pension systems failed to build pension funds, even when it was clear that the benefits the systems were paying could not be sustained in the long run. I argue in this paper that politicians ruling public pension programs have strong incentives to exhaust the pension funds, offering...

This paper shows that labor market policies and institutions have an impact on the effectiveness of economic reform programs. The analysis compares annual growth rates across 119 countries, using data from 449 adjustment credits and loans given by the World Bank between 1980 and 1996. The...

The empirical evidence presented in this paper casts doubts on the by now widely accepted "fact"that the exchange rate based stabilization programs are expansionary. Even though these programs were associated with output booms, no evidence of booms caused both by the stabilization programs is...

The activity rate of mature men has increased in Uruguay in recent decades. This trend is remarkably different from what has been observed in most developed and Latin American countries. We analyze in this paper the incentives to retire implicit in the main social security program of Uruguay. We...

We propose alternative methods to project pension rights and implement them in Chile and Uruguay and partially in Argentina. We use incomplete work histories databases from the social security administrations to project entire lifetime work histories. We first fit linear probability and duration...

We analyze recent trends of the activity rates and retirement of Uruguayan old age workers. We find that in Uruguay, unlike in several developed countries and most Latin American countries, the activity rates of old-age men are not falling. On the contrary, in recent decades the activity rate of...

Incomplete and highly fragmented work histories threaten to leave many contributors of the pension schemes in Latin America without the minimum pension guarantee or even without access to the ordinary pension. We propose a methodology to assess this risk, identify vulnerable groups and study...

The contribution of government transfer programs to inequality is often assessed by analyzing to what extent the benefits paid go to lower income families. Several analysts have found that some key government transfers actually go mostly to middle and high income families and thus contribute to...