Authority, and the behavioral response to authority, is central to many important questions in public economics, but has received insufficient attention from economists. In particular, research has not differentiated between legitimate power and the presumption of expert knowledge, what we call...

This paper proposes and analyzes a Social Security reform in which individuals no longer face the OASI payroll tax after, say, age 54 or a career of 34 years, and their subsequent earnings have no bearing on their benefits. We first estimate parameters of a life-cycle model. Our specification...