A well‐established result in the literature is that Social Security reduces steady state welfare in a standard life cycle model. However, less is known about the historical quantitative effects of the program on agents who were alive when the program was adopted. In a computational life cycle...

In his seminal model (Feldstein, 1985), the government operates a social security system to counter the representative worker's myopia. (i) For a complete myope, he determined a sizable optimal tax rate (and the corresponding benefit level). (ii) For a partially shortsighted worker, he...

China's social safety net is still underdeveloped, hence family support in the form of intergenerational transfers often serves as a substitute for the public transfer system. Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper finds that both upstream inter-vivos...