论社会保障统计指标体系建立的理论前提

我国目前少量有关社会保障统计指标体系的研究基本集中在对其指标的探讨上,理论支撑明显不足。建立社会保障统计指标体系应首先解决三大理论前提,即社会保障统计指标体系的功能定位、社会保障统计信息需求分析、社会保障统计指标体系的理论依据。这三大理论前提决定着社会保障统计指标体系的目标、方向和基础,对建立社会保障统计指标体系具有重要意义。     

The impact of the Social Security Fund on auditor litigation risk

In this study, we examine the effect of the Social Security Fund on auditor litigation risk. Using audit fees as a proxy for auditor perceptions of litigation risk, we find that the Social Security Fund significantly reduces auditor litigation risk. Furthermore, we show that the Social Security Fund influences auditor litigation risk through reducing both the audit risk and the business risk of public companies. In addition, the impact of the Social Security Fund for reducing auditor litigation risk is more obvious in the group of firms with low levels of internal governance, which indicates that the Social Security Fund plays an important governance role as a high-quality institutional investor. In summary, we verify that the Social Security Fund, when acting as an institutional investor, plays an important role in corporate governance, and that it helps to reduce auditor litigation risk. Our results provide empirical support for expanding the governance role of the Social Security Fund as an institutional investor in China’s A-share market.     

The Public Responsibility of Actuaries in American Pensions

Abstract

This article traces the history of the public responsibility of actuaries concerning American pension plans. It includes both defined-benefit and defined-contribution plans for employees of both private and public employers. It does not include Social Security. Actuaries have provided innovative approaches to plan design, funding, funding instruments, accounting, and legal and regulatory requirements. Actuaries have made substantial contributions that have enabled pension plans, together with Social Security, to provide economic security for millions of workers and their dependents when employment ends. However, many Americans still lack assurance of a retirement income that is initially adequate, continues for life, and keeps pace with inflation. Thus, challenges will continue to face pension actuaries in the years ahead.     

Implications of Social Security Reform on Interest Rates: Theory and Evidence

This article investigates the potential effect that Social Security reform may have on bond and equity returns. We specifically focus on the effect of proposals to shift a portion of the investment of the U.S. Social Security Trust Fund to the equities market. Models are developed to demonstrate the relationship between returns and both the relative size of the Social Security Trust Fund and the portfolio allocation of the Trust Fund. Using these two models, we then show that interest rates will increase from either a decrease in the size of the Social Security Trust Fund or a shifting in the investment mix from bonds to equities. We derive an adjustment factor that relates the magnitude of change in interest rates from either source and use this adjustment factor in conjunction with estimates of the relationship between government debt and interest rates to forecast the potential effect on interest rates from shifting part of the Trust Fund to the equity market. The estimates herein suggest that investing some of the Social Security funds in equities is not a painless cure‐all for the Social Security system and may even have some adverse effects in terms of income transfers from American taxpayers to foreign bondholders.     

Arm yourself for the coming battle over Social Security

The U.S. Social Security system is in deep trouble--and that's not just bad news for your friends and family. It's also bad news for your company. Unless the Social Security system is changed, by 2017 the cash flowing out of it will exceed the cash coming in, and by 2041 the system will be utterly insolvent. But the trouble will start sooner than that: In the next decade, the very prospect of the rising deficit will mean serious pressure on recent tax cuts, higher long-term interest rates, increased pension-funding costs, and other punishing conditions for U.S. businesses. Clearly, there's a lot at stake for companies, which is why executives need to participate in the growing debate about Social Security reform, says Robert Pozen, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School who served on the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. In this article, he urges business leaders to take a stance on how the system should be reformed, suggesting they work with interest groups to make their voices heard. After taking a comprehensive look at the debates surrounding Social Security reform, Pozen outlines the three main alternatives executives might choose to support: increasing contributions to Social Security, decreasing the growth of benefits for more-affluent workers, and increasing investment returns on Social Security assets. What's needed to fix the current system, he contends, is a careful balance of all three.     

Strategic asset allocation for individual investors: the impact of the present value of Social Security benefits

This paper demonstrates the dramatic effect of Social Security wealth on individuals’ asset allocation. We first discuss why Social Security wealth should be included in portfolio asset-mix decisions. We then draw parallels between Social Security benefits and inflation-indexed treasury bonds to help quantify the present value of Social Security benefits. Finally, we show the portfolio impact of including Social Security wealth under several asset-mix decision rules. Excluding Social Security wealth from the asset mix decision results in suboptimal portfolios. Including Social Security wealth provides an incentive for including more stock in the asset mix.     

The Public Pension Reform Debate in the United States and International Experience

This article describes the recent debate on Social Security in the United States. To provide some perspectives on the U.S. system, comparisons with public pension systems in other countries are made throughout the article. The article is organized as follows. The first section discusses financing problems in the U.S. Social Security system. Following this, the U.S. Social Security system is described. Options for fixing public pension systems are discussed next. The topic of individual accounts appears in its own section.     

Social Security reform: the effect of investing in equities

Several proposals have been developed to reform the Social Security System to ensure that it is fully funded. The investment of a portion of Social Security funds in equities has often been proposed as a means to avoid increasing payroll taxes. This paper develops a general equilibrium model to demonstrate that investing Social Security funds in equities will decrease the return on equities and increase interest rates on bonds, which also leads to an increase in general income taxes. Thus, investing Social Security funds in equities simply shifts a potential increase in payroll taxes to an increase in income taxes.     

Asset Allocation Under Partial and Complete Privatization of Social Security Contributions

Social Security reform has focused on allowing individuals to choose where to invest a portion of their retirement contributions as a means of avoiding insolvency of the retirement system. Chilean reforms in the early 1980s have demonstrated, at least for a developing and immature stock market, that privatization can be an effective way to increase returns on retirement savings. Mature security markets in the United States provide a large variety of potential investments that appear to be attractive alternatives to the Social Security trust fund's implied rate return of 2.3%. These returns have a zero variance, which still makes them a good choice when compared to more volatile alternatives in the event of full or partial privatization of Social Security contributions assuming assets are allocated according to mean variance efficiency analysis.     

Social security and the rise in health spending

In a quantitative model of Social Security with endogenous health, I argue that Social Security increases the aggregate health spending of the economy because it redistributes resources to the elderly whose marginal propensity to spend on health is high. I show by using computational experiments that the expansion of US Social Security can account for over a third of the dramatic rise in US health spending from 1950 to 2000. In addition, Social Security has a spill-over effect on Medicare. As Social Security increases health spending, it also increases the payments from Medicare, thus raising its financial burden.     

社会保障基金投资浅析——论政府的主导作用及地位

政府是社会保障制度的责任主体，在社会保障基金投资中也具有主导地位。本文首先从政府的角度分析社会保障基金投资的必要性，从而引出政府在社会保障基金投资中如何发挥作用。社会保障基金投资本质是为了实现保值增值，但形式上也成为了政府宏观调控的重要工具，同时实现了经济、社会双重效用。     

The Status of Social Security and Its Role in Retirement Planning: A Professional Advisor's Perspective

Currently, one of the more salient retirement debates surrounds the future insolvency of the Social Security retirement system. In spite of the important role that financial planning professionals play in the retirement and private-savings decisions that individuals make, no research has focused on assessing the opinions of this group. This study uses a survey approach to assess the opinions of financial planning professionals regarding the problems faced by the Social Security retirement system, the solutions that have been proposed thus far, and the use of Social Security benefits in the financial planning process.     

Mitigating America's demographic dilemma by pre-funding social security

Financing Social Security benefits at current levels implies significant increases in payroll taxes within the next 20 years under current US demographic developments. Using a general-equilibrium overlapping-generations model with realistic patterns of fertility and lifespan extension, this study shows that future generations would be harmed during the demographic transition due to rising payroll taxes, which crowd out savings and slow real wage growth below the rate of technological progress. A faster rate of technological progress would mitigate only some of the payroll tax increase and its economic consequences but could not overcome them. Addressing the financing problem by reducing Social Security benefits as needed or by raising the eligibility age for benefits imposes major welfare losses on current or near term retirees. By contrast, a pre-funding of Social Security financed with consumption taxes more evenly spreads the welfare losses across generations, and it helps future generations, especially the poor, by stimulating capital formation.     

Risk sharing across generations without publicly owned equities

The U.S. Social Security trust fund currently invests in government bonds. Investing some of it instead in equities while continuing to pay Social Security benefits under existing rules would alter—potentially improve—the sharing of financial risks across non-trading generations. This paper shows that the same risk sharing can be achieved without direct government ownership of equities if instead the government places a linear and symmetric tax on risky private capital returns. This equivalence is very robust and holds even if some agents are endogenously borrowing constrained.     

Out-of-Pocket Health Expenditures: A Suggested Role for Social Security

We present economic data to demonstrate that the (random) out-of-pocket health-related expenses of seniors who face medical problems are significant and increasing over time. This remains the case even when we take into account the availability of supplemental health insurance. We propose to apply a modest part of Social Security benefits, without increasing the total expenses of this system, to provide mandatory supplemental health insurance for all recipients. Using a theoretical framework we demonstrate that introducing such additional role for Social Security makes individuals (ex ante) better off and hence results in a Pareto dominating new regime for Social Security.     

THE EFFECT OF TAX PREFERENCES ON HEALTH SPENDING

In this paper, we estimate the effect of the tax preference for health insurance on health care spending using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys from 1996-2005. We use the fact that Social Security taxes are only levied on earnings below a statutory threshold to identify the impact of the tax preference. Because employer-sponsored health insurance premiums are excluded from Social Security payroll taxes, workers who earn just below the Social Security tax threshold receive a larger tax preference for health insurance than workers who earn just above it. We find a significant effect of the tax preference, consistent with previous research.     

机构投资者股权对银行公司治理与绩效的影响

在机构投资者对银行进行投资时,不同类型的机构投资者具有不同的表现.其中,QFII、证券公司、社保和保险基金都能影响银行的公司治理,促进其综合业绩的提高;证券投资基金和企业不能对这两个方面产生显著影响.在选择银行股时,证券投资基金注重银行过去综合业绩的表现,企业、社保基金和保险基金注重银行过去市场价值的增长,QFII和证券公司同时考虑了这两个方面.实行银行股权全流通,放松时机构投资者的管制,改革证券交易方面的税收制度,培养机构投资者的投资理念,有利于发挥机构投资者对银行公司治理的积极作用.     

城市化进程中我国民族地区社会保障现状及其改善

随着城市化进程的不断加快，我国现行社会保障体系中存在的问题更加凸显了出来，这些问题主要包括：覆盖面窄、立法滞后、集资渠道窄、资金缺口大且管理不规范等。本文通过对少数民族地区，特别是西北少数民族地区社会保障现状的描述及存在问题的剖析，探讨了在我国城市化进程加快的背景下，改善我国少数民族地区社会保障问题的途径。     

上海与北京两市城镇基本养老保险制度运行比较——兼谈对事业单位养老保险改革的启示

本文通过对上海和北京两市基本养老保险制度运行情况的比较,以＂行政事业单位离退休经费＂和＂社会保障补助支出＂为突破口,分析了上海市城镇基本养老保险基金缺口较大和财政负担较重的原因,认为导致上海市城镇基本养老保险基金缺口逐年增加、财政补贴额度逐年增高的原因除了制度内赡养比降低、制度参数设计缺陷外,上海市较早启动事业单位养老保险制度改革也是重要的影响因素之一。不过,进一步分析认为,上海市将机关事业单位人员纳入城镇基本养老保险制度,表面上的确加剧了城镇基本养老保险基金缺口的形成,但是综合考虑财政支出情况看,将事业单位人员纳入城镇基本养老保险制度的改革还是有利于减轻地方财政支出的负担。在此基础上,提出了促进事业单位养老保险制度改革的一些意见和建议。     

试论“撒切尔革命”对英国社会保障制度的影响及对中国的启示

20世纪80年代以撒切尔夫人为首的保守党对英国进行了长达16年的新自由主义改革,幅度大,效果明显,被人们称为＂撒切尔革命＂,创造了英国80年代经济持续增长的＂撒切尔奇迹＂。＂撒切尔革命＂对政府财政难以为继的社会保障制度进行了重要改革,重新调整了方向,用英国评论界的话说就是＂她对破坏性的、过度的福利制度提出了最勇敢的挑战＂,促使英国的福利国家制度发生重大转型。＂撒切尔革命＂对中国社会保障制度的完善有着重要启示。