The Social Security earnings test reduces a 65-69-year-old's benefits at a 33% rate and a 62-64-year-old's benefits at a 50% rate once earnings pass a threshold amount, among the highest marginal tax rates in the economy. Previous research dismissed the importance of the earnings test but failed...

Over the next fifty years or so, a permanently higher proportion of New Zealanders will become eligible to receive payments of New Zealand Superannuation. The New Zealand Superannuation Fund has been established to smooth the impact this will have on the rest of the Crown's finances. After...

The creeping stock market collapse eroded the wealth of funded pension systems. This led to political tensions between generations due to the fuzzy definition of property rights on the pension funds wealth. We argue that this problem can best be resolved by the introduction of generational...

We propose a positive theory that is consistent with two important features of social security programs around the world: (1) they redistribute income from young to old and (2) they induce retirement. We construct a voting model that includes a 'political campaign' or 'debate' prior to the...

Social Security is designed to provide a base of retirement income, to be supplemented in part by employer-sponsored retirement plans. However, approximately one-quarter of state and local government employees are not covered by Social Security, which federal law allows if their...

If the responses of wages – both private and public – and of pensions to an increase in inflation lead to second-round effects, this can make an inflationary shock more persistent, especially in the presence of automatic wage and pension indexation. This occasional paper presents an overview...

The paper discusses conceptual background of the pension system from the viewpoint of its long-term objective, which is to ensure intergenerational equilibrium irrespective of the demographic situation. This requires stabilisation of the share of GDP allocated to the entire retired generation....

We construct a general equilibrium model in which a pay-as- you-go social security system can be adopted and sustained as a political and economic equilibrium. We analyze the welfare implications of this system and compare general equilibrium welfare measures to the commonly used notion of...

Recent macroeconomic and demographic trends have resulted in new challenges for pension systems. One of these challenges is to create a sustainable pension system while simultaneously providing adequate pension benefits for current and future pensioners. This research explores how similar are...

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...