Increases in longevity, changes in pension structure, and the shift to greater individual responsibility for retirement saving make it important that governments provide workers with information about their public retirement benefits. Public pension statements are one way governments can do...

We reconsider the problem of indexation of public pensions, emphasizing that similar contribution paths should imply similar benefit paths. This robustness criterion is only satisfied by full wage indexing, which in turn requires the politically unpopular reduction of the accrual rates. To...

This paper presents four policy options to make Social Security sustainable under the coming demographic shift: 1) increase payroll taxes by 6 percentage points, 2) reduce the replacement rates of the benefit formula by one-third, 3) raise the normal retirement age from sixty-six to...

Using an overlapping generations model, two new indicators of public pension system sustainability are proposed: the pension space, which measures the capacity to pay for pension expenditures out of labour taxation, and the pension space exhaustion probability reflecting demographic...

In this paper, we explore the underlying explanations for the under financing of the U.S. Social Security pension system that has persisted since the late 1980s despite repeated calls for reform by the program's trustees and various advisory groups. Both micro and macro estimates of the cost...

This essay describes the current debate on reforming Social Security in the US, along with a brief description of how the program works. Along the way it comments on the quality of some proposed reform proposals as well as their political standing. Where issues are similar, some inferences are...