In the debate over federal budget deficits, several politicians have proposed to change the formulas that determine benefit levels for Social Security and other government programs as well as income tax brackets. Switching to a relatively new formula, the Chained CPI, would help the federal...

Danish Flexicurity system presents an example for other EU member countries. This complex approach can lead to a modernization of the European labor markets, an improvement of hiring candidates, a diminishing gap between employed and unemployed and consequently minimization of poverty and social...

The U.S. Social Security benefit structure implicitly creates disincentives towards working long careers. Workers near retirement often gain little additional benefit from continued work because of Social Securitythe benefit formula. This paper develops a framework to examine these disincentives...

Government policies that are based on age do not adjust to changes in remaining life expectancy and lower mortality risk relative to earlier time periods due to improvements in mortality. We examine four possible methods for adjusting the eligibility ages for Social Security, Medicare, and...

Social Security is widely believed to protect its recipients from inflation because benefits are indexed to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). However, the CPI-W may not accurately reflect the experience of retirees for two reasons. First, retirees...

Households can rely on private savings or on public unemployment insurance to hedge against the risk of becoming unemployed. These hedging mechanisms are used differently across countries. In this paper, we use a life cycle model to study the effects of unemployment on the portfolio choice of...

In several OECD countries, public pay-as-you-go pension systems have undergone major reforms in which future retirement benefit promises have been scaled down. A consequence of these reforms is that, especially in countries with a tight tax - benefit linkage, the retirement benefit claims of...

The extensive literature documenting differences in wages between immigrants and US-born workers suggests immigrant households may enter retirement at a significant financial disadvantage relative to households headed by the native-born. However, little work has examined differences in...

Starting from the fact that pensions are the key elements of social protection systems, this study aims to analyze the social policy in Romania in terms of internal and external factors that represent a barrier to the sustainability of the system compared to the achievements of social policy at...

This article studies the determinants of the labor force participation of the elderly and investigates the factors that may account for the increase in retirement in the second half of the last century. We develop a life-cycle general equilibrium model with endogenous retirement that embeds...