Demographic structure and growth: The effect of unfunded social security

This paper examines how demographics affect economic growth in an OLG model with unfunded social security. We derive two interesting results. First, the relationship between population growth and per capita output growth is hump shaped. Second, the relationship between life expectancy and per capita output growth is also hump shaped.     

Sustainable social security: Four options

Four options to make the social security sustainable under the coming demographic shift are presented; increase payroll taxes by 6 percentage points, reduce replacement rates by one-third, raise the normal retirement age to 73, or means-test the benefits and reduce them in income. The paper accounts for labor supply at both intensive and extensive margins and analyzes welfare effects across agents that differ in age, wealth and cohorts. While the four policies all achieve the same goal, economic outcomes differ significantly. Options to curtail benefits encourage own savings and capital accumulation, while the payroll tax increase and the means-test reduce work effort. Future generations prefer options to reduce benefits, but current generations prefer to finance the transition with payroll taxes.     

Labor supply elasticity and social security reform

Previous literature on social security reform has used a variety of period utility functions and calibrated values for the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) in labor. In this paper, we show that the effects of social security reforms on aggregate labor supply are invariant to plausible values of the IES, but the effect of such reforms on the profile of hours over the life-cycle is highly sensitive to the IES. We first establish these results analytically in a simple partial-equilibrium setting and then demonstrate their robustness in a general equilibrium model calibrated to match key U.S. macroeconomic indicators. We find that the aggregate effects are similar regardless of the wide range of the values of IES used in calibrated economies. However, social security reform leads to a large reallocation of hours worked over the life-cycle, from early years to later working years, and the size of this reallocation significantly increases with the IES.     

Growth and social security: the role of human capital

This paper studies the growth and efficiency effects of pay-as-you-go financed social security when human capital is the engine of growth. Employing a variant of the Lucas model [Lucas, R.E., 1988. On the mechanics of economic development. Journal of Monetary Economics 22, 3–42.] with overlapping generations, it is shown that a properly designed, unfunded social security system leads to higher output growth than a fully funded one. Furthermore, the economy with an unfunded social security is efficient, while the other one is not. These results stand in sharp contrast to those obtained in models where the reason for economic growth is physical capital accumulation.     

加强社保基金管理，提高投资收益

2006年上海社保基金案东窗事发，涉案金额达百亿人民币，由于社保基金牵涉老百姓日后生计，关系到社会稳定，一时之间，该案成为社会关注的焦点。但不可否认，在我国社保资金存在巨大缺口的压力下，将社保基金用于投资赚取收益并没有错。这一案件提醒我们，不能因为社保基金的特殊性，就忽略社保基金的投资管理。随着我国社保基金规模不断变大，投资领域和方式的不断出新，加强社保基金投资管理，非常关键。     

Voting on social security: Evidence from OECD countries

We test the subset of models of public choice of social security that have empirical predictions. The data, collected for this paper from the OECD countries for the years 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990, provide some support for each of the theories. Higher median voter age, more income heterogeneity, greater similarity in family size, and variables that make a public pension program more profitable are all associated with a larger program. However, none of the theories explains why the shape of the age distribution and the time trend are so important. The results are robust under both fixed effects and random effects estimation.     

Optimal social security tax with myopic agents

Myopic agents lack the foresight to save for their own old age. It is generally believed that correcting myopia is a rationale for a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system. This view has been supported by existing literature showing that the optimal PAYG social security tax should increase when people are more myopic. In this paper we obtain new results opposed to the traditional view. By establishing a very standard general equilibrium OLG model with myopic agents and endogenized marginal product of capital, we show that the optimal social security tax should be lower when people are more myopic. Our numerical analysis also shows that the welfare cost of the social security tax increases with people's degree of myopia. These results suggest that correcting myopia is not a clear rationale for the PAYG social security.     

社会保障的新理念与中国农民扶持性社会保障体制

中国的市场化改革使广大的中国农民直接暴露在现代市场经济风险下,而家庭联产承包制的实施又使改革开放前与计划经济体制相适应的保障体制无法运转,这样,中国广大农民成为了现代市场经济中最没有保障的弱势群体。因此,建立农民社会保障体系的意义重大。中国农民社会保障体制迟迟没有建立的原因有二:其一,传统社会保障理念仅考虑到其工具价值,忽视了其目的价值;其二,农民的组织化程度低,导致他们在社会利益分割过程中没有谈判地位。从建立农民社会保障体制的双重价值出发,建立保障农民生存权和基本发展权的农民扶持性社会保障体制具有重要意义。     

论加大财政对社会保障的投入是构建和谐社会的基础

人权中最首要的、最基础的是生存权。加大财政对社会保障的投入，使社会保障有坚强稳定的资金支持，有利于从根本上维护我国公民的基本生存权，从而为我国的人权事业和构建和谐社会提供经济和制度保障。     

On the formation of interaction networks in social coordination games

There are many situations where two interacting individuals can benefit from coordinating their actions. We examine the endogenous choice of partners in such social coordination games and the implications for resulting play. We model the interaction pattern as a network where individuals periodically have the discretion to add or sever links to other players. With such endogenous interaction patterns we see multiple stochastically stable states of play, including some that involve play of equilibria in the coordination game that are neither efficient nor risk-dominant. Thus the endogenous network structure not only has implications for the interaction pattern that emerges, but it also has a significant impact on the play in the coordination game relative to what would arise if the same interaction network were exogenous.     

统筹城乡社会保障制度的研究

统筹我国城乡社会保障发展是进一步提高城乡经济水平的需要,也是全面落实科学发展观的必然要求。一直以来,我国社会保障发展的特点是城乡分割的二元结构,农村的社会保障制度建设相对落后,而城镇却已经建立起了现代化的社会保障体系。通过分析制约城乡社会保障制度建设的主要因素,从而提出城乡社会保障统筹发展的对策,为实现我国城乡社会保障的均衡发展提供保证。     

Unions, progressive taxes, and education subsidies

Progressive income taxes moderate distortionary wage demands by trade unions and thereby reduce unemployment, and at the same time underlie disincentives to acquire skills and decrease labour productivity. Governments can respond by combining progressive taxes with subsidies to investment in human capital. A system of generous education subsidies and steep progressive tax rates is more likely to emerge, the greater the market power of trade unions and the better the ability of governments to influence private education decisions. Empirical analysis for several OECD countries provides results consistent with these propositions. A policy mix of high education subsidies and relatively progressive income taxes is found in countries where union membership is significant.     

Social interaction and children's academic test scores: Evidence from the National Child Development Study

We explore the relationship between educational attainment and social interaction using individual level data from the British National Child Development Study. To be specific, we analyze whether an intergenerational aspect to this relationship exists by examining the relationship between the educational attainment of children and the degree of formal social activity undertaken by their parents. Our results suggest that children's scores in reading, mathematics and vocabulary tests are positively associated with the extent of their parents’ formal social interaction, and this relationship is robust to alternative definitions of social interaction.     

Social security and retirement incentives in Austria

This paper provides an overview of the interaction between social security and retirement behavior in Austria in the decades up to the on-going reform process. The key question is, how much of the retirement behavior can be attributed to incentive effects of the pension system. We describe the labor market and retirement behavior of the elderly in Austria, survey the key features of the public pension system and finally present the results of a series of simulations aimed at assessing the retirement incentives generated by the pension system. We compute levels and accrual rates of social security wealth and implicit tax rates on continued work according to the method portrayed in Gruber and Wise [Gruber J, Wise D (1999) Social security and retirement around the world. University of Chicago Press, Chicago London]. To some extent, the sharp drop in labor force participation among the elderly must be attributed to major disincentives of the Austrian pension system; the system turns out to provide significant incentives to retire early. Past reforms have reduced the disincentives. Our results, however, show the need to further reform the public pension scheme and to reorient it stronger towards the principle of actuarial fairness.     

Life expectancy, human capital, social security and growth

We analyze the effects of changes in the mortality rate upon life expectancy, education, retirement age, human capital and growth in the presence of social security. We build a vintage growth, overlapping generations model in which individuals choose the length of education and the age of retirement, and where unfunded social security pensions depend on workers' past contributions. Social security has a positive effect on education, but pension benefits favor reductions in retirement age. The net effect is that starting from a benchmark case, higher life expectancies give rise to lower per capita GDP growth in the presence of social security as the share of the active population is reduced. In addition, higher social security contribution rates reduce the growth rate of per capita GDP.     

A positive theory of social security

In this paper I make two points. First, I argue that social security programs around the world link public pensions to retirement: people do not lose their pensions if they make a million dollars a year in the stock market, but they do confront marginal tax rates of up to 100 percent if they choose to work. Second, after arguing that most existing theories cannot explain this fact, I construct a positive theory that is consistent with it. The main idea is that pensions are a means to induce retirement—that is, to buy the elderly out of the labor force because aggregate output is higher if the elderly do not work. This is modeled through positive externalities in the average stock of human capital: because skills depreciate with age, the elderly have lower-than-average skill and, as a result, have a negative effect on the productivity of the young. When the difference between the skill level of the young and that of the old is large enough, aggregate output in an economy where the elderly do not work is higher. Retirement is desirable in this case, and social security transfers are the means by which such retirement is induced. The theory developed in this paper is also shown to be consistent with a number of other regularities documented in Section 1.     

Do immigrants delay retirement and social security claiming?

ABSTRACT

We use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine how immigrants’ retirement and Social Security claiming patterns compare to those of natives. We find that immigrants retire and claim Social Security at older ages than natives, an effect that is similar across immigrant ethnic groups and more pronounced among immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after age 40. We discuss and explore possible mechanisms for these differences. Hazard models suggests that these differences arise because immigrants have lower retirement and claiming hazard rates in their early 60s. We do not find evidence of an increase in the rate at which immigrants move abroad or exit the survey, compared to U.S. natives, in their late 50s through 60s, a finding that is consistent with immigrants retiring in the U.S. rather than abroad. These results are important given the rising share of older immigrants living in the U.S., and they have implications for the impact of immigration on government finances as well as the retirement security of an important subgroup of the population.     

论农民工社会保障的构建

现在上亿农村劳动力进入城镇就业,农民工已经成为我国产业工人的主体。近年来,农民工问题受到了社会各界的广泛关注,农民工的社会保障问题也逐步进入政府视野,农民工社会保障建设纳入政府工作日程。     

Social security in a Classical growth model

This paper develops a growth model with overlapping generationsof workers who save for life-cycle reasons and Ricardian capitalistswho save from a bequest motive. The population of workers accommodatesgrowth, so that the rate of capital accumulation is endogenousand determines the growth of employment. Two regimes are possible,one in which workers' saving dominates the long run and a secondin which the long-run equilibrium growth rate is determinedcompletely by the capitalist saving function, sometimes calledthe Cambridge equation. The second regime exhibits a versionof the Pasinetti paradox: changes in workers' saving affectthe level, but not the growth rate, of capital in the long run.Applied to social security, this result implies that an unfundedsystem relying on payroll taxes reduces workers' lifetime wealthand saving, creating level effects on the capital stock withoutaffecting its long-run growth rate. These effects are mitigatedby the presence of a reserve fund, various levels of which areexamined. Calibrating the model to realistic parameter valuesfor the US facilitates an interpretation of the controversiesover the percentage of the national wealth originating in life-cyclesaving and the effects of social security on saving. The modelis offered as an analytical framework for the review of currenttopics in fiscal policy, in particular identifying the socialsecurity reserve fund as a potential vehicle for generatingcapital accumulation and effecting a progressive redistributionof wealth.     

Cooperative behavior and the frequency of social interaction

We report results from an experiment that examines play in an indefinitely repeated, two-player Prisoner's Dilemma game. Each experimental session involves N subjects and a sequence of indefinitely repeated games. The main treatment consists of whether agents are matched in fixed pairings or matched randomly in each indefinitely repeated game. Within the random matching treatment, we elicit player's strategies and beliefs or vary the information that players have about their opponents. Contrary to a theoretical possibility suggested by Kandori [1992. Social norms and community enforcement. Rev. Econ. Stud. 59, 63–80], a cooperative norm does not emerge in the treatments where players are matched randomly. On the other hand, in the fixed pairings treatment, the evidence suggests that a cooperative norm does emerge as players gain more experience.