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Journal ArticleDOI

A Positive Theory of Social Security Based on Reputation

Thomas F. Cooley, +1 more
- 01 Feb 1999 - 
- Vol. 107, Iss: 1, pp 135-160
TLDR
In this article, a general equilibrium model was constructed in which a pay-as-you-go social security system can be adopted and sustained as a political and economic equilibrium, and the welfare implictions of this system were analyzed.
Abstract
We Construct a general equilibrium model in which a pay‐as‐you‐go social security system can be adopted and sustained as a political and economic equilibrium. We alalyze the welfare implictions of this system and compare general equilibrium welfare measure to the commonly used notion of actuarial fairness.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

Social Security Reform with Heterogeneous Agents

TL;DR: The authors analyzes the role of idiosyncratic uncertainty in an economy in which rational agents vote on hypothetical social security reforms and concludes that the status quo bias in favor of an unfunded social security system is stronger in economies in which agents of similar age differ significantly with respect to labor earnings and wealth due to idiosyncratic income uncertainty.
Posted Content

What Are the Gains from Pension Reform

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a unified analytical framework for the analysis of social security reform, and discuss reform along two dimensions: pay-as-you-go versus fully funded on the one hand, and actuarial versus non-actuarial on the other.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Gains from Pension Reform

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors classify social security pension systems in three dimensions: actuarial versus non-actuarial, funded versus unfunded, and defined-benefit versus defined contribution systems.
ReportDOI

Political Economics and Public Finance

TL;DR: This article surveys the recent literature that has tried to answer this question and adopts a unified approach in portraying public policy as the equilibrium outcome of an explicitly specified political process, and divides the material into three parts, focusing on median voter equilibria that apply to policy issues where disagreement between voters is likely to be one-dimensional.
Journal ArticleDOI

Reforming pensions: Myths, truths, and policy choices

TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the building blocks of pension reform in the light of economic theory and their application to different types of economy, and the range of choices facing policymakers, drawing on the very different arrangements in different countries.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Are Government Bonds Net Wealth

TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the effects of different types of intergenerational transfer schemes on the stock of public debt in the context of an overlapping-generations model and show that finite lives will not be relevant to the capitalization of future tax liabilities so long as current generations are connected to future generations by a chain of operative inter-generational transfers.
Journal ArticleDOI

An Exact Consumption-Loan Model of Interest with or without the Social Contrivance of Money

TL;DR: This article developed the equilibrium conditions for a rational consumer's lifetime consumption-saving pattern, a problem more recently given by Harrod the useful name of "hump saving" but which Landry, Bbhm-Bawerk, Fisher, and others had touched on long before my time.
Journal ArticleDOI

Social Security, Induced Retirement, and Aggregate Capital Accumulation

TL;DR: The authors used an extended life-cycle model to analyze the impact of social security on the individual's simultaneous decision about retirement and saving, and found that social security depresses personal saving by 30-50 percent.
Journal ArticleDOI

A life cycle analysis of social security

TL;DR: The authors developed an applied general equilibrium model to examine the optimal social security replacement rate and the welfare benefits associated with it and found that an unfunded social security system may well enhance economic welfare.
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