166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old age Social Security as a public program? We document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and implicit taxes on labor supply,...

Why are the old politically successful? We build a simple interest group model in which political pressure is time-intensive, showing that in the political competitive equilibrium each group lobbies for government policies that lower their own value of time but the old do so to a greater extent...

This paper compares the differences of individual coverage in the fully-funded social security systems of three Latin American countries. Chile, Columbia, and Mexico each have defined contributions social security systems, yet there are significant differences in system design and incentive that...

Advanced countries worry about the future of their pay-as-you go pension schemes and try to introduce supplementary sources for revenue following employment termination. It is thus useful to understand how the pension schemes influence households behavior regarding saving and accumulation of...

I examine the effects of the introduction of the Spouse's Allowance to the Canadian Income Security system on the retirement behaviour of couples. This policy intervention provides an excellent opportunity to investigate how income security programs affect the timing of retirement. The structure...

The Office of Retirement and Disability Policy at the Social Security Administration created the Retirement Research Consortium in 1998 to encourage research on topics related to Social Security and the well-being of older Americans, and to foster communication between the academic and policy...

This working paper, which will appear as a chapter of Framing the Social Security Debate (forthcoming Fall 1998) (Brookings Institution Press), discusses two regulatory problems associated with the privatization of social security: first, the risk that political interference with social security...

This work deals with the analysis and evaluation of the presence of gender disparities in European pension systems, with a special focus on Italy. We document the existence of gender gaps in the pension systems and we discuss their causes. We focus first on how the pension system design may...

Many theories and public discussions about pension systems and their reforms are based on the assumption that individual age is a major factor in determining individual preferences for or against public pension schemes. The aim of this paper is to explore whether different age groups do indeed...

In an OLG (overlapping generations) economy with only two risky factors of production, human capital and physical capital, a social security system that optimally shares risks among generations was incorporated. By allowing for physical capital acumulation, this paper extends John Compbell's...