I examine the effect of Old-Age Insurance (OAI) on older women's labor-force participation in fourteen countries since around 1930. Older women's participation has risen in the US, but has fallen over time in some European countries. The discontinuity of incentives at the state pension age helps...

Features of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program and the social security retirement system may interact in a manner that creates incentives for prospective SSI recipients to take social security early retirement (SSER). This paper takes a first close look at this issue. The work...

In the presence of means tested basic income for old age, households will tend to reduce precautionary savings to an inefficiently low level. We explore how this might serve as a justification for a compulsory public pension system. In a representative agent framework with two income types,...

The Australian age pension is noncontributory, funded through general tax revenues and means tested against pensioners, private resources, including labour earnings. This paper constructs an overlapping generations (OLG) model of the Australian economy to examine the economy wide implications of...

Most industrialized countries are struggling with reforming their retirement income systems. The systems have mainly been based on public pay-as-you-go plans but as the systems have become mature they have increased the fiscal burden of nations and become an inadequate device for financial...

Most industrialized countries are struggling with reforming their retirement income systems. The systems have mainly been based on public pay-as-you-go plans but as the systems have become mature they have increased the fiscal burden of nations and become an inadequate device for financial...

We analyze the political stability of capital funded social security. In particular, using a stylized theoretical framework we study the mechanisms behind governments capturing pension assets in order to lower current taxes. This is followed by an analysis of the analogous mechanisms in a...

Poor heath, large acute and long-term care medical expenses, and spousal death are significant drivers of impoverishment among retirees. We document these facts and build a rich, overlapping generations model that reproduces them. We use the model to assess the incentive and welfare effects of...

One of the most important consequences of the Chilean pension reform undertaken in the early 1980s was to transfer a significant portion of the risk associated to the financing of pensions, from the State, to the pension fund participants of the newly established compulsory pension system. This...

Almost all papers on the feasibility of a Pareto improving transition path from a Pay-as-you-go to a fully funded system employ lump sum or wage taxes for financing the compensating transfers. This paper focuses on this issue by using consumption or proportional income taxes and applying a...