Current proposals for welfare reform in the UK are based on a Universal Credit, intended simultaneously to simplify the structure of benefits while offering sensitive and rapid responsiveness to personal circumstances. The two objectives are in conflict, and neither can be achieved by the proposals.

Much attention has been paid to the significant underfunding of many state and local employee pension plans, as well as efforts by states and cities to alleviate that underfunding by modifying the benefits provided to workers. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the systemic causes...

This paper considers socially optimal government policies in a dynastic family model with physical capital, human capital, endogenous fertility and positive spillovers from average human capital. Such spillovers reduce human capital investment but raise fertility from their social optimum. We...

This paper studies the long-run aggregate and welfare effects of eliminating Social Security in a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium life-cycle model where parents and their children are linked by voluntary and accidental bequests. Social Security in this model with impure altruism has a...

This paper studies the role of the two-part golden rule as a demarcation line between efficient and inefficient steady states in the neoclassical two-generations-overlapping model with heterogeneous agents. If agents differ regarding their labor endowment, the golden rule ceases to serve its...

In a two-period model with agent heterogeneity we analyze a pension reform toward a stronger link between contributions and benefits (as recently observed in several countries) in a pension system with a Bismarckian and a Beveridgean component. We show that such a policy change may discourage...

Population aging leads to a major fiscal crisis in almost the entire developed world. Changes in fertility, mortality and immigration can hardly do anything to alleviate the future demographic stresses. Radical reforms of the social security systems can help to improve the future fiscal and...

This study bounds the potential earnings of accepted disability applicants by the post-application earnings of rejected applicants. Compositional differences between the two groups are addressed using a reweighting estimator. As shown, the bound on earnings is similar regardless of weighting.

There are substantial cross-country differences in labor supply late in the life cycle (age 50+). A theory of labor supply and retirement decisions is developed to quantitatively assess the role of social security, disability insurance, and taxation for understanding differences in labor supply...