Review of \u3cem\u3eSocial Security Programs and Retirement Around the World: Micro Estimation.\u3c/em\u3e Jonathan Gruber and David A. Wise (Eds.). Reviewed by John B. Williamson.

Book review of Jonathan Gruber and David Wise (Eds.), Social Security Programs and Retirement Around the World: Micro Estimation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, $99.00 hardcover

Review of \u3cem\u3eSocial Security and Retirement Around the World.\u3c/em\u3e Jonathan Gruber and David A. Wise (Eds.). Reviewed by Martin B. Tracy, Southern Illinois University.

Book review of Jonathan Gruber and David A. Wise (Eds.), Social Security and Retirement Around the World. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999. $62.00 hardcover. [June 1, 1999]

Refundable Tax Credits for Health Insurance: The Sensitivity of Simulated Impacts to Assumed Behavior

We replicate and extend a simulation model developed by Jonathan Gruber with the goals of illuminating Gruber's modeling of health insurance coverage under a tax credit and examining the sensitivity of the results to changes in the model's key parameters. The replications suggest that a refundable tax credit of $1,000 for a single individual or$2,000 for a family for private health insurance would reduce the number of uninsured individuals by between 17.5 and 28 percent and require new government expenditures of between $16.6 and$44 billion, of which about $7.4 -$9.7 billion would be for coverage of previously uninsured individuals. These wide simulated ranges highlight the uncertainty inherent in modeling the effects of health insurance tax credits and suggest that progress on the issue of tax credits for health insurance will require improved evidence on the likely take-up rate of a credit.health, insurance, Gruber, tax, credit, Woodbury, Emmons, Upjohn

Choosing a Medicare Part D Plan: Are Medicare Beneficiaries Choosing Low-Cost Plans?

Examines whether Medicare enrollees choose the prescription drug plans with the lowest premiums and out-of-pocket expenses for them from among multiple private insurance options. Estimates how much enrollees would have saved with the lowest-cost plan

The Wealth of the Unemployed: Adequacy and Implications for Unemployment Insurance

While there has been considerable discussion of the adequacy of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits as a form of income replacement, there is little evidence on the other resources that the unemployed have to finance their unemployment spells. In this paper I focus on focus on one form of resources, own wealth holdings. I find that the median worker has financial assets sufficient to finance roughly two-thirds of the income loss from an unemployment spell, but that there is tremendous heterogeneity in wealth holdings; almost one-third of workers can't even replace 10% of their income loss. Most strikingly, ex-ante wealth holdings decline precipitously with realized unemployment durations, both absolutely and (especially) relative to ex-post income loss, suggesting that adequacy could be increased if UI benefits were targeted to those with longer spells. I also find strong evidence that individuals who are eligible for more generous UI draw down their wealth more slowly during unemployment spells. This demonstrates that wealth is used as a consumption smoothing device alongside UI to cope with the income loss from unemployment.

The Incidence of Payroll Taxation: Evidence from Chile

Despite the growing reliance on payroll taxation worldwide, there is limited evidence on the incidence of payroll taxes. I provide new evidence by examining the experience of Chile before and after the privatization of its Social Security system. This policy change led to a sharp exogenous reduction in the payroll tax burden on Chilean firms; the average payroll tax rate in my sample fell from 30% to 5% over this six year period. I use data from a census of manufacturing firms, which contains information on firm specific tax payments and average wages. I find strong evidence that the incidence of payroll taxation was fully on wages, with no effect on employment. A potential weakness with this approach is that some of the variation in firm-specific tax rates may be spurious, for example due to measurement error in wages. I attempt to surmount this problem by using a variety of different estimators, all of which yield consistent evidence of full shifting.