Social Security: An Investment in Family Protection

When Social Security was passed into law in 1935, it was not intended to be an investment program to which Americans could contribute. Rather, it was established as a risk pool to which all Americans were mandated to contribute in order to insure the presence of a stable safety net. Social Security began in the Great Depression but by 1956 it had evolved into a full-scale family-oriented insurance program that included survivors' benefits. Its intent is to provide families with support for the contingencies that occur throughout the course of life, including disability, retirement and survival of widows and children. Thus, dependent spouses and children of victims of the tragic September 11th terrorist attacks will receive Social Security survivors' benefits.It is amazing to realize that public insurance provided by Social Security to cover disability and death is greater than all private coverage of life and disability, and that it covers some 3 million children as well as older people. In fulfilling its mission, the International Longevity Center studies a variety of systems to meet the needs of people through their life course in the United States and abroad. This Brief explores the Social Security Program in the US

Testing for Constant Hedge Ratios in Commodity Markets: A Multivariate Garch Approach

The authors develop a new multivariate GARCH parameterization that is suitable for testing the hypothesis that the optimal futures hedge ratio is constant over time, given that the joint distribution of cash and futures prices is characterized by autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity. The advantage of the new parameterization is that it allows for a flexible form of time-varying volatility, even under the null of a constant hedge ratio. The model is estimated using weekly corn prices. Statistical tests reject the null hypothesis of a constant hedge ratio and also reject the null that time variation in optimal hedge ratios can be explained solely by deterministic seasonality and time-to-maturity effects.

The Effects of the Food Reserve Agency on Maize Market Prices in Zambia

This policy synthesis estimates the effects of the Zambia Food Reserve Agency’s (FRA) activities on maize market prices in the country. The FRA, a government parastatal strategic food reserve/maize marketing board, buys maize at a pan-territorial price that typically exceeds wholesale market prices in major maize producing areas. It then exports the maize or sells it domestically at prices determined by tender, at auction, or administratively. In deficit production years, the Agency often imports maize and sells it to select large-scale millers at below-market prices.Zambia, Maize, Food Security, Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Security and Poverty,

Consistency Conditions for Brane Worlds in Arbitrary Dimensions

We consider ``brane world sum rules'' for compactifications involving an arbitrary number of spacetime dimensions. One of the most striking results derived from such consistency conditions is the necessity for negative tension branes to appear in five--dimensional scenarios. We show how this result is easily evaded for brane world models with more than five dimensions. As an example, we consider a novel realization of the Randall--Sundrum scenario in six dimensions involving only positive tension branes.Comment: 18 pages, LaTex, refs. adde

Ultraviolet modifications of dispersion relations in effective field theory

The existence of a fundamental ultraviolet scale, such as the Planck scale, may lead to modifications of the dispersion relations for particles at high energies, in some scenarios of quantum gravity. We apply effective field theory to this problem and identify dimension 5 operators that do not mix with dimensions 3 and 4 and lead to cubic modifications of dispersion relations for scalars, fermions, and vector particles. Further we show that, for electrons, photons and light quarks, clock comparison experiments bound these operators at 10^{-5}/Mpl.Comment: Version to appear in Phys.Rev.Let

Global Social Security: How the Rules are Changing in Certain Countries

Social security programs (i.e., national pension systems) differ widely between countries. This is only natural, and desirable, because of varying social and economic conditions and philosophies. This paper discusses some of the general worldwide trends, such as the equal treatment of men and women, increases in the normal retirement age, projection of future costs, and the different philosophies of social security. Some of the interesting and unique changes recently made in selected countries-Canada, Chile, Eastern European countries, Germany, Japan, People\u27s Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, United Kingdom, and United States-are described