Social Security and Retirement around the World: Historical Trends in Mortality and Health, Employment, and Disability Insurance Participation and Reforms - Introduction and Summary

This is the introduction and summary to the fifth phase of an ongoing project on Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World. The first phase described the retirement incentives inherent in plan provisions and documented the strong relationship across countries between social security incentives to retire and the proportion of older persons out of the labor force. The second phase documented the large effects that changing plan provisions would have on the labor force participation of older workers. The third phase demonstrated the consequent fiscal implications that extending labor force participation would have on net program costs—reducing government social security benefit payments and increasing government tax revenues. The fourth phase presented analyses of the relationship between the labor force participation of older persons and the labor force participation of younger persons in twelve countries. We found no evidence that increasing the employment of older persons will reduce the employment opportunities of youth and no evidence that increasing the employment of older persons will increase the unemployment of youth. This phase is intended to set the stage for and inform future more formal analysis of disability insurance programs, with this key question: Given health status, to what extent are the differences in LFP across countries determined by the provisions of disability insurance programs? Here we first consider changes in mortality over time and in particular the relationship between mortality and labor force participation, thinking of mortality as one indicator of health that is comparable across countries and over time in the same country. We then consider how mortality is related to other indicators of health status, in particular self-assessed health and then how trends in DI participation are related to changes in health. Finally we consider the effect on disability insurance participation of “natural experiments” in which the disability insurance reforms were not prompted by changes in health status or by changes in the employment circumstances of older workers. We find that these “exogenous” reforms can have a very large effect on the labor force participation of older workers.

Divestiture as a Private Remedy

Never in the sixty-eight year history of the Clayton Act has a court compelled a divestiture at the request of a private party, yet the Supreme Court had considered divestiture a primary remedy for Clayton Act violations as early as 1961. The author reviews reasoning that supports and opposes divestiture as a private remedy and concludes that because of the powerful and complex issues of public policy, economics and law involved a legislative response should be awaited

Constitutional Law - Due Process - State Court Jurisdiction - Quasi in Rem Proceedings

The United States Supreme Court has held that a state\u27s assertion of quasi in rem jurisdiction over a nonresident defendant by attachment of the contractual obligation of the defendant\u27s liability insurer, who is licensed to do business in the forum, is unconstitutional absent other contacts between the defendant and the forum. Rush v. Savchuk, 444 U.S. 320 (1980)

The empirical accuracy of uncertain inference models

Uncertainty is a pervasive feature of the domains in which expert systems are designed to function. Research design to test uncertain inference methods for accuracy and robustness, in accordance with standard engineering practice is reviewed. Several studies were conducted to assess how well various methods perform on problems constructed so that correct answers are known, and to find out what underlying features of a problem cause strong or weak performance. For each method studied, situations were identified in which performance deteriorates dramatically. Over a broad range of problems, some well known methods do only about as well as a simple linear regression model, and often much worse than a simple independence probability model. The results indicate that some commercially available expert system shells should be used with caution, because the uncertain inference models that they implement can yield rather inaccurate results

Two-Point Correlation for Rich Clusters of Galaxies

The rich-cluster two-point correlation function is examined in a model where rich clusters of galaxies form at high peaks of primordial Gaussian mass-density fluctuations (averaged over a suitable volume). Particular attention is paid to the case when the primordial fluctuations have a Zel'dovich spectrum

A powerdoman semantics for indeterminism

A denotational semantics is presented for a language that includes multiple-valued functions (essentially Lisp S-expressions), which map from ground values into the power domain of ground values. The domain equations are reflexive. and fixed points of all functions are defined. Thus, it is possible to specify an operating system as a function whose codomain is a set of possible behaviors of the system, only one of which is realized under an operational semantics. Such a system can be specified using "pure" applicative programming (recursion equations without side effects) over primitive functions like amb, frons, arbiter, or arbit, all of which are formally defined. Tempered by 'environmental transparency,' we consider a power domain semantics in which the power domain may only occur within the codomain in the equation that defines func­tion space. The problem addressed is how to define the analog of 'fixed point' for a function from the ground domain to that power domain, in a semantics that uses natural extension as the axiom for function application. Denotational and equivalent operational semantics are presented for the Smyth-upside-down power domain; a similar denotational semantics is presented for the Plotkin power domain (Egli-Milner order), along with a likely operational semantics