The paper investigates the impacts of demographic change on the financial sustainability of a pay-as-you-go social security system in an economy with unemployment caused by trade unions. Using a simple two-period overlapping generations approach, it can be shown that the trade union behavior...

The Earnings Public-Use File (EPUF) contains complete information on annual Social Security-covered earnings for a sample of 3.13 million Americans who had earnings in at least one year between 1951 and 2006. The panel data are used to examine patterns and trends in lifetime earnings. The EPUF...