This paper identifies the key economic issues that must be addressed in the debate over a privatized social security system. We examine a two-pillar plan. The first pillar would consist of a demogrant: a small indexed pension of the same dollar amount for all retirees who had contributed to the...

We examine two measures of monthly manufacturing production. The first is the index of industrial production; the second is constructed from the accounting identity that output equals sales plus the change in inventories. We show that the means, variances, and serial correlation coefficients of...

This paper describes how three money's worth measures the benefit-to-tax ratio, the internal rate of return, and the net present value are calculated and used in analyses of social security reforms, including systems with privately managed individual accounts invested in equities. Declining...

Microdata studies of household saving often find a significant group in the population with virtually no wealth, raising concerns about heterogeneity in motives for saving. In particular, this heterogeneity has been interpreted as evidence against the life-cycle model of saving. This paper...

In this paper, we examine Ricardian equivalence of debt and tax finance in a world in which taxes are not lump-sum but are levied on risky labor income. First, we show that the marginal propensity to consume out of a tax cut, coupled with a future income tax increase, is positive under...

In the standard analysis of an overlapping generations economy with gifts from children to parents, each generation takes the actions of all other generations as given. The resulting "simultaneous moves" equilibrium is dynamically inefficient. In reality, however, parents precede children in...

The issue of whether higher lifetime income households save a larger fraction of their income is an important factor in the evaluation of tax and macroeconomic policy. Despite an outpouring of research on this topic in the 1950s and 1960s, the question remains unresolved and has since received...

One measure of the health of the Social Security system is the difference between the market value of the trust fund and the present value of benefits accrued to date. How should present values be computed for this calculation in light of future uncertainties? We think it is important to use...

Only one-fourth of U.S. families own stock. This paper examines whether the consumption of stockholders differs from the consumption of non-stockholders and whether these differences help explain the empirical failures of the consumption-based CAPM. Household panel data are used to construct...

Many advocates of social security privatization argue that rates of return under a defined contribution individual account system would be much higher for all than they are under the current social security system. This claim is false. The mistake comes from ignoring accrued benefits already...