Social security programs generally seek to provide insurance and to reduce poverty and inequality. Providing insurance requires little redistribution. But reducing inequality and alleviating poverty do require redistribution. To reduce inequality, programs must redistribute income, but...

In his seminal model (Feldstein, 1985), the government operates a social security system to counter the representative worker's myopia. (i) For a complete myope, he determined a sizable optimal tax rate (and the corresponding benefit level). (ii) For a partially shortsighted worker, he...

The United States Social Security Amendments of 1983 (SSA1983) increased the full retirement age (FRA) and increased penalties for retiring before the FRA. This cut to retirement benefits caused spillover effects on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applications and receipt by making...

The policy brief presents a review of potential effects of parametric pension reform in Belarus starting in 2017 for the population aged 50 and more in terms of unemployment, alcohol consumption, and poverty. It concludes that, despite the fact that raising the retirement age is overdue in...

To counteract aging populations, statutory pay-as-you-go pension systems are subject to fundamental reforms in many Western societies. Starting with cohort 1937, Germany introduced permanent pension deductions for early retirement. This paper examines the evolution of the profitability of...

Immigration is having an increasingly important effect on the social insurance system in the United States. On the one hand, eligible legal immigrants have the right to eventually receive pension benefits but also rely on other aspects of the social insurance system such as health care,...

The extensive literature documenting differences in wages between immigrants and US-born workers suggests immigrant households may enter retirement at a significant financial disadvantage relative to households headed by the native-born. However, little work has examined differences in...

Using social security administrative records, we estimate indicators of incentives to retire in a sample of males affiliated to the main Uruguayan social security program and we assess their impact on retirement and pension claims observed between 1996 and 2004. In line with standard results in...

This paper examines how unemployment late in workers' careers affects the timing of their retirement. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation from 1996 to 2011, we document that unemployed workers permanently leave the labor force at a significantly higher rate than...