We present a new database of social security indicators for eleven Latin American countries designed to assess pension schemes in terms of the payments they promise in return to contributions. Based on this data, we analyze inequality, insurance and incentives to work. Our results indicate that...

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 empirical evidence presented in this paper casts doubts on the by now widely accepted “fact’’ that exchange rate based stabilization programs are expansionary. Even though these programs were associated with output booms, no evidence was found to support the thesis that the booms were...

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...

I analyze political agency models with potentially two equilibria, one in which elections are e¤ective selection mechanisms and only "good" individuals participate in politics and another one in which elections are not e¤ective and "bad" individuals participate in politics. These equilibria...