This paper examines retirement behavior and household income for older persons in Chile. It pays close attention to the sources of household income, income inequalities, and the economic vulnerability of older persons. This is important in order to evaluate whether labour market and social...

A fundamental question in personal finance is deciding when to retire. This article is a theoretical investigation within a conventional life-cycle setting. It finds two closed-form solutions to the retirement timing problem. One solution, based on an isoelastic form of the utility function and...

The Health and Retirement Study (HRS), administered by the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, is a longitudinal survey of the population of U.S. households with at least one adult between the ages of 51 and 61 in 1992 (individuals born between 1931 and 1941). In...

This study considers those wage earners who are covered by a social security program as part of the formal sector and those wage earners who are not covered by any social security program as part of the informal sector. Using 1994 Household Expenditure Survey I first examine how individuals are...

We investigate channels of federally provided income insurance for U.S. States, finding that a major part of federal insurance is provided through transfers. We compare the "bang for the buck" of various fiscal institutions, finding that unemployment benefits are dramatically more efficient in...

The purpose of this paper is twofold: it presents the current state of the welfare state in the European Union, and it considers its future prospects given the various challenges to which it is exposed. In the presentation of social protection, which is the main component of the welfare state,...

The European population is living longer but retiring earlier. More and more individuals are spending an increasing fraction of their lifetime relying on retirement benefits. At the same time, social security programs face mounting financial difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to explain...

The Health and Retirement Study (HRS), administered by the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, is a longitudinal survey of the population of U.S. households with at least one adult between the ages of 51 and 61 in 1992 (individuals born between 1931 and 1941). In...

The European Union consists of a wide variety of welfare states with social insurance schemes ranging from those providing earnings related benefits (Bismarckian)to flat rate benefits (Beveridgean)systems. The conventional wisdom is that with factor mobility poor people have incentives to move...

This paper argues that social security enjoys wider political support than other welfare programs because: (i) retirees constitute the most homogeneous voting group, and (ii) the intragenerational redistribution component of social security induces low-income young to support this system.