This paper reviews the financial position of Social Security, presents a plan for saving it, and discusses why Social Security revenue should not be diverted into individual accounts. Our approach preserves the value of Social Security in providing a basic level of benefits for workers and their...

The Bush administration is said to be considering several new tax cuts, including increasing the deductible amount of capital losses, reducing capital gains tax rates, indexing capital gains for inflation, raising contribution limits for IRAs and 401(k)s, and reducing taxes on dividends. This...

Two of the Social Security Commission's plans restore actuarial balance without their individual accounts, primarily or entirely through benefit reductions. Both have voluntary carve-out individual accounts, with one requiring (subsidized) add-on contributions for opening accounts. "Liability...

This report examines the federal budget outlook and evaluates alternative fiscal policy choices. Official projections of the federal budget surplus have declined dramatically in the past year. Adjusting these measures for the treatment of retirement trust funds, realistic estimates of future tax...

This paper examines the federal budget outlook and evaluates alternative fiscal policy choices. Official projections of the federal budget surplus have declined dramatically in the past year. Adjusting such measures for the treatment of retirement trust funds, realistic estimates of future tax...

The book American Economic Policy in the 1990s, which has a publication date of Spring 2002 from MIT Press, is the outcome of a conference held at the Kennedy School in June 2001. It brought together leading policy-makers and economists, with the goal of providing a preliminary history of U.S....

As climate-induced physical and transition risks to corporations are becoming more and more material, investors are increasingly scrutinizing a patchwork of voluntary climate-related communications–namely public disclosures, emission reduction commitments, and soft information from earnings...

The President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security proposed three reform plans. Two, analyzed here, restore actuarial balance in the absence of individual accounts. One achieves this balance solely through benefit reductions. The other uses new dedicated revenue to cover one-third of the...

Front-loading of charges on insurance products can impose considerable costs on consumers when policies lapse early. This paper develops a theory of the maturity structure of charges similar to that used to examine the term structure of interest rates, and applies it to the UK experience with...

The UK requires individuals with individual pension accounts to annuitize before the age of 75. Using a time series of annuity prices and quantities, we apply the methodology of Mitchell et. al. (1999) to examine the value of UK market annuity rates relative to theoretical values. We find that...