Social security system old age insurance systems are devices for the sharing of income risks of elderly people with others. Risks can be shared intergenerationally (with the young of the same country), intragenerationally (with other elderly of the same country) or internationally (with foreigners). Barriers to individuals themselves sharing their risks intergenerationally, intragenerationally ...

In this paper, we examine the effects of introducing actuarially fair annuity markets into an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth. We find the complete annuitization of agents’ wealth is not, in general, dynamically optimal; that the degree of annuitization that is dynamically optimal depends nonmonotonically on the expected length of retirement and on the pay-as-you-go social se...

Most yearsfrom the 1880’s to thepresent have seen the enactment of laws establishing new social security programs or expanding existing ones. Programs established before 19.55 have been reported in earlier issues of the Bulletin and in special reports by the Social Security Administration. New legislation affecting the various programs is summarized in the first part of the article; some of the...

According to the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China and the effective conventions therein, every citizen should enjoy equal right of social security. But in reality, a peasant has much less such right than an urban dweller, only because of their different hukou. Peasants, as part of the investors of state-owned property, should have the rights of owners and enjoy the benefits from t...

This paper examines the historical evolution of China's rural taxation system and provides an initial assessment of the ongoing rural tax reform. It is argued that the issue of rural taxation and local governance in China is one typical challenge arising from the inherent tension between an increasingly liberalized economic system and a still centralized political system. Though the rural tax r...

In recent years, a large number of studies have investigated the relationship between social security benefits and male retirement decisions in developed countries. However, women’s and couples’ labour supply decisions and the patterns of withdrawal from the labour force in emerging economies are much less studied. This paper uses Brazilian data from 1998 to 2008 to examine how social security ...

Dynamic Efficiency and Pareto Optimality in a Stochastic OLG Model with Production and Social Security We analyze the interaction between risk sharing and capital accumulation in a stochastic OLG model with production. We give a complete characterization of interim Pareto optimality. Our characterization also subsumes equilibria with a PAYG social security system. In a competitive equilibrium i...

In this paper we consider the design and implementation of a pay-as-you-go social-insurance system as a problem in political economy. We consider whether a society of forward-looking rational economic agents would implement a system in which the level of benefits depends on the relative shares of different age groups in the population. We calibrate a model economy to match long-run features of ...

In this paper we examine the scope of cross-country variation in institutions related to social insurance. Building on the variation we find we assess the value of new micro data that is comparable across countries to help identify key parameters of individual behavior. We present multiple aspects of labor force participation, including disability benefit receipt, as well as wealth accumulation...