We present a new database of social security indicators for 11 Latin-American countries designed to show how much they promise to pay in return to contributions. These are based on micro-simulations according to existing norms. We use response-surface analysis to characterize simulation results....

We present a simple model of a benevolent government that provides insurance to risk averse individuals. As in macroeconomics, commitment to fully contingent rules is better than discretion, but when the government can only commit to simple rules, discretion may be the best available option. The...

The estimations in this paper show that there is a high risk that a very significant share of the workers registered in the work history of the main social security institution of Uruguay (the BPS) will not be able to comply with the condition of contributing 35 years to access the pension when...

In this paper we analyze the recent performance, perspectives and some policy options for two public social security programs in Uruguay: pensions and unemployment insurance. We review the impact of these programs on public expenditure, including recent and expected future trends, and on income...

We simulate the budget of the main pension institution of the country, the Banco de Previsión Social (BPS), from 1995, the year the reform was passed, to 2050, when the new system should be mature. We perform several sensitivity analyses to evaluate which are the key exogenous variables and...

The purpose of this paper is to serve as an input in the revision of the evaluation guidelines of the Department of Economics FCS – UDELAR (dECON). With this aim, we report on what is taken into account in academic evaluation around the world, and which are the most frequently used methods of...

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...

This paper discusses the welfare effects of trade in a Heckscher-Ohlin model of trade with costs of adjustment. The paper analyses the efficiency and the distributional effects of eliminating a tariff in a formerly protected sector. The tariff can be eliminated at the onset or after a while. In...

In Uruguay, the pension programs cover over 90% of the elderly. Men are more likely to be eligible for the contributory pensions, while women are over-represented in the assistential and survivor pension programs. This difference is linked to the fact that women tend to have longer spells out of...

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...