Security markets between generations are incomplete due to a biological trading constraint' that prevents living generations from negotiating contingent contracts with the unborn. This paper shows, however, that government policy can be used to replicate the trades that would have occurred if...

This paper shows that many common methods of privatizing social security fail to reduce labor market distortions when taxes are second best, challenging a key reason to privatize. Ironically, providing "transition relief" to workers alive at the time of the reform, in an effort to protect their...

Terrorist attacks worldwide during the past several years have spurned an interest in understanding not only how governments can mitigate terrorism risk but also how governments might help finance future losses. This interest was buttressed by the seemingly failure of the private insurance...

With over $1 trillion in assets, the U.S. Social Security trust fund is the largest pension reserve in the world, and potentially a model for other developed countries facing future financing problems. But are those assets actually worth anything?' This question has generated a heated debate in...

Unfunded defined-benefit (DB) public pension plans throughout the world are being converted to funded defined-contribution (DC) plans that typically contain a minimum benefit guarantee (DC-MB). Risk management techniques must be used to control the cost of these guarantees. The most common...

This paper proves that the stock-bond portfolio choice of the Social Security trust fund is equivalent in general equilibrium to the tax treatment of capital income by the non-social security part of government. A larger [smaller] share of social security's portfolio invested in stocks is...

Most macroeconomic analyses rely on either an infinite horizon model (in which people care about their descendants as much as they care about themselves) or an overlapping generations model (in which people don't care about their descendants at all). But if we are interested in fiscal policies...

This paper shows the macroeconomic and welfare implications of an aging population in the United States, using an overlapping-generations model with heterogeneous households. The model uses three population projections in Social Security Administration (2003), and generates economies as...

This paper describes a stochastic overlapping generations (OLG) model with heterogeneous agents, which is one of five models used at the Congressional Budget Office for recent fiscal policy analyses. In this model economy, households are heterogeneous with respect to their age, wealth holding,...