Publicly held debt to GDP ratio in the U.S. has reached 68% in 2011 and is expected to continue rising. Many proposals regarding the ways to curb the government deficit and the resulting debt are being discussed. In this paper, we use the standard neoclassical growth model to examine the...

The aging of the populations in the OECD countries has prompted various calls for reforming the existing pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension systems. Currently, there is renewed discussion in the United States about partial privatization where a fraction of the social security payroll tax would be...