Demographic and economic characteristics have been shown to provide important predictive power for determining a country’s success in the Olympic Games. This paper extends such research, providing a set of predictions for the gold medals and total medals each country will win at the 2006...

Since the 1990s, Vietnam has experienced a dramatic growth in remittance flows. This paper uses the Vietnam Living Standard Surveys for 1992/93 and 1997/98 to study the role of gender in these remittance flows, both from the perspective of receiving and sending remittances. Knowing about gender...

Section I reviews some of the important contributions using time series evidence to estimate Social Security’s impact on private savings. Essential to these studies is the use of a “Social Security Wealth” (SSW) variable, created by Martin Feldstein (1974), which defines the present value...

Benefit reductions will likely be a part of the eventual Social Security reform in the United States. This research attempts to quantify the intragenerational and intergenerational impacts of different benefit reduction proposals on the incomes of the elderly. Reforms include across-the-board...

We seek to analyze a number of important issues related to the ownership of government pensions. In the United States, Social Security is operated on a pay-as-you-go basis, with some limited pre-funding to prepare for the baby boom retirement. Moving toward more of a defined contribution system...

In recent years, the share of elderly in the total population is increasing around the world. Rising proportionally are claims on public pension systems and health care expenditures. This places extra pressure on government budgets. As a result, countries which implement only pay-as-you-go...

An understanding of the financial and distributional consequences of Social Security reform requires knowledge about the actual life circumstances of participants, including the level and pattern of their lifetime earnings and when they retire. Some analyses of Social Security reform make...

Pakistan’s pension system is in the process of increasing funding in anticipation of providing for a growing elderly population. The pension assets are mainly invested domestically, as it was just in January 2007 that regulations changed to allow the purchase of international assets. In this...

Remittances can potentially help to promote economic development by providing a mechanism to share risks, reduce poverty, and improve equality. However, the overall impacts of remittances are uncertain from the view of economic theory as different mechanisms lead to opposite impacts. Since the...

Many countries are currently increasing the advanced funding of their public pension systems to improve their sustainability in the face of rapidly aging populations. When pensions are funded, the issue of asset allocation becomes of paramount importance. Standard portfolio selection theory...