The 15 years since the old-age and survivors insurance system began operations have demonstrated that social insurance can be successfully applied to meet American needs for protection against the economic risks of death and old-age retirement in modern life. Belief by Congress in the soundness of social insurance was strikingly reaffirmed in the enactment, by nearly unanimous vote, of the 1950...

This paper discusses five examples of the conventional wisdom that has often been expressed in the social security debate, even among academic economists. These are: 1. The major problem in most social security systems is that of demography: people simply live too long. 2. Disregarding the issue of demography, a Pay-As-You-Go system is inferior to a fully funded system since the former usually ...

This paper studies the impact of an unfunded social security system on the distribution of bequests in a framework where savings are due both by life cycle and by random altruistic motivations. We show that the impact of social security on the distribution of bequests depends crucially on the importance of the bequest motive in explaining savings behavior. If the bequest motive is strong, then ...

General political topics, like social security and foreign affairs, recur in electoral manifestos across countries. The Comparative Manifesto Project collects and manually codes manifestos of political parties from all around the world, detecting political topics at sentence level. Since manual coding is time-consuming and allows for annotation inconsistencies, in this work we present an automa...

For the time being, this experimental process, financed by the Government of the Netherlands, is limited to three developing countries – Honduras, Mali and Sri Lanka; if found successful, this process can be replicated in many other developing countries. In each country, a national diagnosis is to be developed through the concerted efforts of government ministries, representatives of employers ...

This paper presents results from an impact analysis of the Ticket to Work (TTW) program, as implemented by the Social Security Administration (SSA) from 2002 through 2007. For new, young Social Security Disability beneficiaries, we use exogenous variation in the month of Ticket mailing to rigorously estimate impacts of TTW on beneficiary outcomes over a 48-month period following the start of Ti...

Identifying the effect of the financial incentives created by social security systems on the retirement behaviour of individuals requires exogenous variation in program parameters. In this paper we study the 1993 Australian Age Pension reform which increased the eligibility age for women to access the social security benefit. We find economically significant responses to the increase in the Age...

Currently policy makers in Belgium are focused on making teachers and other employees work longer. Policy makers are worried that the financial crisis, increasing life expectancy, expected teacher shortages, and the retirement of the baby boom generation, will put pressure on the social security system and in the end would make the social security system unsustainable. For this reason several p...

We propose an extended PAYG social security system that conditions pension benefits on the aggregate wage sum and on the wage of one’s children. The latter increases parents’ incentives to provide their children with good within-family education. However, since wages depend stochastically on parents’ unobservable investment in their children’s human capital, some insurance against the productiv...

Despite wide recognition that social security is a basic human right, fewer that 10 percent of people in the poorest countries have social security coverage. This has an enormous impact on their lives and on work itself. What little earning power the impoverished have is further suppressed by marginalization and lack of support systems – particularly when they are unable to work because of age,...