Reforming Old Age Security: Effects and Alternatives

Micropensions: Old Age Security for the Poor?

How can microfinance be expanded to include approaches to the problems facing poor and very poor people in developing countries when they become too old to support themselves? Microfinance clients have long been signalling their demand for such services by doing their best to use current microfinance products, such as microcredit, in ways that create assets that can help protect them in old age...

Private versus Public Old-age Security

We compare two institutions head on, a family compact – a parent makes a transfer to her parent in anticipation of a possible future gift from her children – with a pay-as-you-go, social security system in a lifecycle model with endogenous fertility wherein children are valued both as consumption and investment goods. Our focus is strictly on the pension dimension of these competing institution...

Financial and Health Security in Old Age: Three Essays

Political Mediation and American Old-Age Security Exceptionalism

Debates over America’s heavy reliance on employer-provided private pensions have understated the profound role organized labor played after World War II. Archival evidence from prominent unions and business associations suggests that the shift in organized labor’s strategy after the New Deal toward electoral activity helps explain critical interventions by Northern Democrats into the system of ...

Reforming: Social Security A Welfare Analysis

T he U.S. Social Security System was conceived as a means to ensure a minimum standard of living for the elderly, and it has done so. Poverty rates among the old have dropped, and many retirees can now look forward to a comfortable retirement, funded in part by their Social Security benefits. However, the system' s ability to provide future retirees with a comparable retirement income has been ...