How I reversed an unfair UR denial

When an insurer wouldn't pay for a drug his patient needed, the author let loose a barrage of letters. See what made them work.     

Endogenous retirement and public pension system reform in Spain

Population aging has spurred developed countries around the world to reform their PAYG pension systems. In particular, delaying legal retirement ages and reducing the generosity of pension benefits have been widely implemented changes. This paper assesses the potential success of these policies in the case of the Spanish economy, and compares them with the results obtained by the (rather modest) reforms already implemented in 1997 and 2001. This evaluation is accomplished in a heterogeneous-agent dynamic general equilibrium model where individuals can adjust their retirement ages in response to changes to the pension rules. We check the ability of the model to reproduce the basic stylized facts of retirement behavior (particularly the pattern of early retirement induced by minimum pensions). The model is then used to explore the impact of pension reforms. We find that already implemented changes actually increase the implicit liabilities of the system. In contrast, delaying the legal retirement age and extending the averaging period in the pension formula to cover most of the individual's life-cycle can reduce the implicit liabilities substantially. These findings reveal the failure of the Spanish political system to distribute the costs of population aging more evenly across the generations.     

FINANCIAL CONSISTENCY IN LONGITUDINAL MICROSIMULATION: HOMEMAKER PENSIONS RE-EXAMINED

Transfer programs, including public pension plans, do not generate wealth. In this paper methods of distributional analysis that lack budget constraints and are prone to illusions of wealth creation are criticized. A microsimulation analysis reported in "Homemaker Pension and Lifetime Redistribution" (Wolfson, 1988) is repeated using a conceptual framework that imposes a balance between the positive and negative impacts of transfer programs. This alternate analytical perspective reverses the distributional conclusions of the earlier study conducted using the same model.     

Zur Lohn- und Zinstheorie

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