SOCIAL SECURITY: OVERVIEW AND OPTIONS

The intense controversy about the future of Social Security is found to be basically political. Adjustments that are relatively minor from an economic point of view suffice to maintain the viability of Social Security and of the economy as a whole. The defined-benefit, pay-as-you-go character of Social Security inevitably produces politically troubling crises as the system matures. Five options for change are considered, with special attention given to a defined-cost system which would gradually adjust benefits and avoid both cyclical and long-term crises     

Home production and Social Security reform

This paper incorporates home production into a dynamic general equilibrium model of overlapping generations with endogenous retirement to study Social Security reforms. Specifically, home production takes housing, home input, and home hours as inputs and produces a good that is substitutable with market good. As such, the model differentiates both consumption goods and labor effort according to their respective roles in home production and market activities. Using a calibrated model, we conduct a policy experiment where we eliminate the current pay-as-you-go Social Security system. We find that the experiment has important implications for labor supply as well as consumption decisions and that these decisions are influenced by the presence of the home production technology. More importantly, comparing our economy to a one-good economy without home production, the welfare gains of eliminating Social Security are magnified significantly especially in the long run. The reasons are twofold and related to the general aspects of home production. First, home production implies a more elastic labor supply rendering the payroll labor tax more distortionary. Second, home production introduces insurance possibilities that are not present when only market-produced goods are available and, thus, reduces the need for government redistributive policies.     

DISENTANGLING THE ANNUITY FROM THE REDISTRIBUTIVE ASPECTS OF SOCIAL SECURITY IN THE UNITED STATES*

In the United States, the life-cycle relationship between initial Social Security contributions and subsequent benefits causes the effect of Social Security on income distribution to be overestimated in a single-period analytical framework. By separating the annuity from the redistributive aspects of Social Security we provide a life-cycle framework for measuring its net effect on redistribution. To this point in its history, we find all income classes have received positive net life-cycle income transfers and, in an absolute sense, upper-income groups have done at least as well as lower-income groups. This suggests a reason for the near-universal support of Social Security by past generations, as well as the controversy which now surrounds it. As it becomes apparent to younger cohorts of taxpayers that many of them will be net losers, it is inevitable that Social Security will be subject to the same controversy as other welfare programs which attempt to redistribute income.     

On Sustainable Pay-as-You-Go Contribution Rules

An unfunded social security system faces the major risk, sometimes referred to as "political risk," that future generations do not agree to contribute as much as expected. In order to account properly for this risk, the paper considers a political process in which the support to the system is asked from each new born generation. The analysis is conducted in an overlapping generations economy that is subject to macroeconomic shocks. As a consequence, the political support varies with the evolution of the economy. The impact of various factors—intragenerational redistribution, risk aversion, financial markets, governmental debt—on the political sustainability of a pay-as-you-go system is discussed.     

Social security generosity,budgetary deficits and reforms in North Cyprus

This paper estimates the fiscal burden of the historical pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) Social Insurance Pension System in North Cyprus and analyzes the appropriateness of the 2008 reforms that introduced the new Social Security Pension System. Estimates are made of the system deficit. To bring the magnitude of the unfunded cost of the pension system down to a sustainable level, major parametric reforms will need to be made to the system. These include increasing the age of retirement, increasing the rate of contributions, changing the method of indexing of pension benefits and decreasing the theoretical replacement rate of the pension benefits.     

Projected U.S. Demographics and Social Security

Without policy reforms, the aging of the U.S. population is likely to increase the burden of the currently unfunded Social Security and Medicare systems. In this paper we build an applied general equilibrium model and incorporate the population projections made by the Social Security Administration (SSA) to evaluate the macroeconomic and welfare implications of alternative fiscal responses to the retirement of the baby-boomers. Our calculations suggest that it will be costly to maintain the benefits at the levels now promised because the increases in distortionary taxes required to finance those benefits will reduce private saving and labor supply. We also find that the “accounting calculations” made by the SSA underestimate the required fiscal adjustments. Finally, our results confirm that policies with similar long-run characteristics have very different transitional implications for the distribution of welfare across generations. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D52, D58, E21, E62.     

Privatizing Social Security in the United States—Comparing the Options

This paper uses a new version of the Auerbach–Kotlikoff model to consider alternative ways to privatize the U.S. Social Security System. The new model incorporates intra- and intergenerational heterogeneity and is closely calibrated to U.S. fiscal institutions. Three privatization issues are considered: financing the transition, participation rules, and progressivity. As shown, Social Security's privatization can substantially raise long-run living standards. But these gains come at the cost of welfare losses to transition generations and take a long time to materialize. The long-run poor have much to gain from privatization even absent an explicit redistribution mechanism. Finally, privatizations that give initial workers the option of remaining in the current system have particularly low transition costs and particularly favorable macroeconomic consequences. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D9, E6.     

Shifting from pay-as-you-go to individual retirement accounts: A path to a sustainable pension system

With aging demographics and generous pension programs, the sustainability of the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) public pension system has been often questioned and has motivated policymakers to enact reforms in many countries. Although mandatory funded Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) appear to be a solution to this unsustainable system, existing reforms usually take place within the PAYG system by reducing pension benefits. This paper evaluates the effects of PAYG reforms as well as reforms that switch to the IRA system. Our analysis shows that PAYG reforms outperform IRA reforms in many aspects. In fact, PAYG reforms achieve higher GDP and yield higher welfare in the long run. The transition to the steady state is also found to be less volatile for PAYG reforms. While PAYG generally places a larger burden on future generations, the positive welfare effect of cross-subsidization dominates the welfare loss. Our findings may explain why pension reform is a controversial issue in most countries and why we rarely observe a shift to the IRA system.     

The Economics of Pensions: A non-conventional approach

This paper examines two alternative pension systems, pay-as-you-go (PAYGS) and the capitalisation system (CS) in the light of alternative economic theories. It starts from a critical discussion of the insurance-fiction model of PAYGS proposed by Samuelson in 1958. The pros and cons of that model are illustrated by taking into consideration the non-orthodox views of Keynes, Lerner, Pechman, de Finetti and Eisner. Next, the paper investigates the relationship between CS and the marginalist capital theory. It is shown that, interpreted in a neoclassical framework, CS presents endogenous mechanisms of adjustment to demographic shocks. The problems of the transition between PAYGS and CS are then examined. The paper then discusses some main features of the current US policy debates on the Social Security system. Finally, the alleged advantages of a wider adoption of CS are criticised in the light of the Keynesian theory of effective demand reinforced by the Sraffian criticism of neoclassical capital theory.     

Generalised Social Security Finance in a Two-Country World

This paper develops an overlapping generations model with generalised finance of social security in a two-country world. Social security finance includes a pay-as-you-go, a fully funded, and an optimal system as special cases. An increase in social security funding of country 1 increases capital, income and consumption per head in both countries. Also, it increases foreign assets in country 1 and foreign debt in country 2. The optimal level of social security funding is below the golden rule level. During adjustment an increase in funding has negative effects on country 1 and positive effects on country 2.     

完善我国社会保障基金投资运营机制对策研究

社会保障基金是社会保障制度实施的核心条件和物质基础,社会保障基金投资运营机制的完善关系到社会保障基金的安全和有效运行。完善我国社会保障基金投资运营机制必须以福利经济学与投资组合理论为科学依据,关注社会保障机制与社会保障制度的协调发展。尤其在我国经济转型期,合理解决社会保障基金投资运营机制的关键在于社会保障基金应实行资本化经营,资金投向应逐渐向低风险、长收益的项目上实现多元化战略投资转移。     

Social security and economic performance in Portugal: after all that has been said and done how much has actually changed?

This paper provides an empirical estimate of the macroeconomic effects of the Portuguese pay-as-you-go social security system based on data for the period 1970?C2007 and on VAR estimates using GDP, the unit cost of labor, the unemployment rate, the savings rate and social security spending. The major findings are twofold. First, growing social security spending has had detrimental effects on all of the private sector variables under consideration suggesting the existence of sizable inefficiencies. Second, these inefficiencies persist despite the successive reforms that took place over the last two decades. These results highlight the need for structural reforms of the pay-as-you-go system thereby addressing the sources of these inefficiencies, regardless of whether or not the system is financially sustainable. Furthermore, any reforms designed to address sustainability concerns cannot ignore these inefficiencies or risk making them even worse and thereby hindering the quest for sustainability itself.     

Social Security, Optimality, and Equilibria in a Stochastic Overlapping Generations Economy

Social security institutions implement intergenerational transfers and distribute risks over time. To compare various social security designs, we study an overlapping generations model with demographic shocks. Production takes place through a neoclassical production function subject to productivity shocks. We give a near characterization of optimal allocations. We study rational expectations equilibria when contributions are mandatory, based on labor and capital income. We also describe the equilibria of an economy with a voluntary pay-as-you-go social security fund, and show that they have a long-run optimality property. An example with Cobb–Douglas production and utility functions illustrates the results.     

On the Pro-Social Security Rhetoric

We propose to reframe Social Security to offer a coherent anti-privatization rhetoric that has not been fully provided in the contemporary literature. The dissatisfaction that motivated this study centers on the observation that the prevalent anti-privatization rhetoric exposes the drawbacks of Private Retirement Accounts (PRAs), but this rhetoric itself doesn't satisfactorily explain why the current Social Security system is more desirable. In reframing Social Security, we will follow a two-stage strategy. First, we will articulate the desirability of Social Security grounded in the function it serves in a way PRAs are not suited for serving: being a social income insurance scheme whose provision inherently favors the least fortunate in a Rawlsian fashion. Second, we will concentrate how Social Security provides this non-market choice by drawing on the unique resources not entirely available to the market.     

Is Social Security Really Bad for Growth?

This paper develops a model of endogenous growth with overlapping generations to investigate the joint determination of social security, public investment, and growth in a small open economy. We show that a pure pay-as-you-go system with benefits indexed to wages provides taxpayers with incentives to support growth-oriented policies, which increase the future productivity of labor. We find that outcomes characterized by positive levels of intergenerational redistribution, public investment, and long-run growth can be sustained as subgame-perfect Nash equilibria of an infinitely repeated intergenerational game, if and only if the marginal productivity of public capital is large enough. Furthermore, we show that transfers comove with public investment and growth. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E62, H55.     

Self-Enforcing Intergenerational Social Contracts for Pareto Improving Pollution Mitigation

We consider, in an overlapping generations model with an environmental externality, a scheme of contracts between any two successive generations. Under each contract, agents of the young generation invest a share of their labor income in pollution mitigation in exchange for a transfer in the second period of their lives. The transfer is financed in a pay-as-you-go manner by the next young generation. Different from previous work we assume that the transfer is granted as a subsidy to capital income rather than lump sum. We show that the existence of a contract which is Pareto improving over the situation without contract for any two generations requires a sufficiently high level of income. In a steady state with social contracts in each period, the pollution stock is lower compared to a steady state without contracts. Analytical and numerical analysis of the dynamics under Nash bargaining suggests that under reasonable conditions, also steady state income and welfare are higher. Delaying the implementation of a social contract for too long or imposing a contract with too low mitigation can be costly: Net income may inevitably fall below the threshold in finite time so that Pareto improving mitigation is no longer possible and the economy converges to a steady state with high pollution stock and low income and welfare. In the second part of the paper, we study a game theoretic setup, taking into account that credibly committing to a contract might not be possible. We show that with transfers granted as a subsidy to capital income, there exist mitigation transfer schemes which are both Pareto improving and give no generation an incentive to deviate from any of its contracts even in a dynamically efficient economy. Social contracts coexist with private savings.     

The Effects of Health, Wealth, and Wages on Labour Supply and Retirement Behaviour

This paper estimates a life cycle model of labour supply, retirement, and savings behaviour in which future health status and wages are uncertain. Individuals face a fixed cost of work and cannot borrow against future labour, pension, or Social Security income. The method of simulated moments is used to match the life cycle profiles of labour force participation, hours worked, and assets that are estimated from the data to those that are generated by the model. The model establishes that the tax structure of the Social Security system and pensions are key determinants of the high observed job exit rates at ages 62 and 65. Removing the tax wedge embedded in the Social Security earnings test for individuals aged 65 and older would delay job exit by almost one year. By contrast, Social Security benefit levels, health, and borrowing constraints are less important determinants of job exit at older ages. For example, reducing Social Security benefits by 20% would cause workers to delay exit from the labour force by only three months.     

The effect of changes in Social Security on bequests

The net effect on intergenerational transfers of an increase in Social Security benefits will depend on how much of the increase is consumed and how much bequeathed. I show analytically that the marginal propensity to consume an increase in Social Security benefits is indeterminate: it could range from zero to 1.0 or even larger. At one extreme bequests would fully offset the increase in benefits; at the other bequests would fall. According to simulations based on an estimated model of life-cycle behavior, consumption increases by slightly more than the increase in Social Security benefits, causing bequests to fall. That is, bequests do no offset at all an increase in transfers from the younger generation to the older.     

On optimality in intergenerational risk sharing

Summary. This paper defines and studies optimality in a dynamic stochastic economy with finitely lived agents, and investigates the optimality properties of an equilibrium with or without sequentially complete markets. Various Pareto optimality concepts are considered, including interim and ex ante optimality. We show that, at an equilibrium with a productive asset (land) and sequentially complete markets, the intervention of a government may be justified, but only to improve risk sharing between generations. If markets are incomplete, constrained interim optimality is investigated in two-period lived OLG economies. We extend the optimality properties of an equilibrium with land and give conditions under which introducing a pay-as-you-go system at an equilibrium would not lead to any Pareto improvement. Received: October 5, 1998; revised version: April 3, 2001     

Explaining the wealth holdings of different cohorts: Productivity growth and Social Security

In this paper, we explore the reasons why different generations accumulate different amounts of wealth. We use basic economic theory to propose two indicators of the economic conditions under which households accumulate wealth. The first one represents productivity differences across cohorts: The aggregate level of gross national product per capita around the time the head of the household entered the labor market. The second measure summarizes the changes in Social Security during the head of household's working life. Using panel data from the Dutch Socio-Economic Panel, we show that productivity growth can explain all the cohort effects present in income data, while productivity growth and the generosity of Social Security can explain all the cohort effects present in household net worth. We also find a limited offset of Social Security on wealth holdings.