Mandatory pension systems play a major role in individual savings and labor supply decisions. In particular, it is well known that defined benefit pension schemes, which are not actuarially fair, can create incentives for early retirement and therefore reduce labor supply and the stock of human...

Social protection systems in Latin America have been transformed in the past two decades. Until the 1980s, those who were not covered by the social security arrangements available primarily in the urban formal sector received little public assistance beyond universal subsidies for some food or...

This paper solves and estimates a stochastic model of optimal inter-temporal behavior to assess how changes in the design of the unemployment benefits and pension systems in Brazil could affect savings rates, the share of time that individuals spend outside of the formal sector, and retirement...

This paper developsa general equilibrium model to analyze the marginal and joint impacts that alternative macroeconomic, education, and social protection policies have on the dynamics of employment and unemployment by skill level. The model introduces a disaggregated treatment of the labor...

Decentralization of fiscal responsibilities has emerged as a primary objective on the agendas of national governments, and international organizations alike. Yet there is little empirical evidence on the potential benefits of this intervention. The authors fill in some quantitative evidence....

The authors develop a model of optimal growth to assess the risks of an HIV/AIDS epidemic and the expected economic impact in nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa region-Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen. The model incorporates an HIV/AIDS...

In this paper the authors reconsider the idea of an earnings-related pension system with reserves invested in indexed government bonds as a mechanism to both ensure financial sustainability and improve security. They start by reviewing the characterization of the sustainable rate of return of an...