Many political economic theories use and emphasize the process of voting in their explanation of the growth of Social Security, government spending, and other public policies. But is there an empirical connection between democracy and Social Security program size or design? Using some new...

Social security plays an essential role in an economy, but if designed incorrectly can distort the labor supply and savings behavior of individuals in the economy. We explore how well the Australian means-tested pension system provides social insurance by calculating possible welfare gains from...

A growing chorus of policy analysts is calling for an increase in the Social Security retirement age. Even staunch defenders of Social Security have begun to concede that the retirement age of 66 is too low, in light of the increasing longevity, improving health, and expanding work options of...

Increases in longevity, changes in pension structure, and the shift to greater individual responsibility for retirement saving make it important that governments provide workers with information about their public retirement benefits. Public pension statements are one way governments can do...

Singapore’s pension system is based on two major premises. First, it is possible to finance retirement expenditure almost entirely by mandatory savings of households which are micro-managed and intermediated by the state. Second, the pension system should focus on mitigating absolute rather...

The survivor dividend, at a specific age, is the portion of participants' credited account balances that is distributed on a birth cohort basis from the account balances of participants who do not survive to retirement. This paper develops a model to show whether it would be justified to include...

This paper simulates a transition from the current pay-as-you-go Social Security system to a prefunded system based on Personal Retirement Accounts (PRAs). Annual PRA contributions of 2 percent of taxable payroll earning the historical return on the corporate sector are sufficient to close the...

We study the optimal provision of social security in a dynamically efficient economy using a continuous-time overlapping-generations model in which consumers have short planning horizons. The short-horizon mechanism leads to dynamic optimization that is time-inconsistent over the life cycle. Our...

Together, pensions, social security and health insurance account for half of the wealth held by all households in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), for 60 percent of total wealth of HRS households who are in the 45th to 55th wealth percentiles, and even for 48 percent of wealth for those in...

Using a regression discontinuity framework, this paper documents a previously unnoticed drop of 7%–8% in the U.S. suicide rate upon reaching age 62 during 1990–2014. This decline is concentrated among men, nearly doubled in size over the most recent decade as the income gap between those...