As part of the search for answers to questions about what could be done to increase labor force participation rates among older workers in the United States, it makes sense to take a close look at evidence from Japan, one of the few industrial countries with a higher labor force participation...

While numerous Western countries first experienced cultural rationalization, next economic modernization, and then faced the challenges of population aging and pension policy reform, both Latin America and China, in contrast, are dealing with these challenges in the context of much less...

Notional defined contribution (NDC) accounts represent a new model for social security reform that so far has been adopted in seven countries. While NDC schemes remain public, they call for the individual accounts favored by neoliberal policy analysts. NDC schemes would address many of the...

A number of studies have attempted to account for cross-national differences in life expectancy, but relatively few have focused on female life expectancy, and even fewer on the relevance of predictors linked to gender stratification theory. The present study seeks to assess the utility of...

While much has been written about the medical, economic, and social causes of cross-national differences in some mortality related phenomena such as in life expectancy and infant mortality, much less attention has been given to maternal mortality, the focus of the present study. In the studies...

The American workforce and the role of employee benefits have changed dramatically since the 1980s when economists seriously considered dual labour market models to describe pay and employment patterns. Then, dual labour market models described men's labour markets, but not women's and the tests...

Why are pension funds so large and benefits so small? This examination of the 120-year-old American system of privatized social insurance--often called, at 1.7 trillion dollars, the biggest lump of money in the world--reveals that the system fails to provide adequate retirement income security,...