Social Security Incentives and Human Capital Investment

While the effect of social security systems on retirement decisions has received much attention, there are no analytical results on the impact of these systems on individual incentives to invest in human capital. We integrate human capital investment and retirement decisions in an analytical life-cycle model with full certainty and investigate how different social security schemes may affect human capital investment and labor supply. We analyze and compare three different social security systems, differing on whether benefits are conditional on withdrawal from the labor market and on previous income

Data for: Promises, policies and pocketbook voting

Abstract of associated article: Do voters respond to political parties׳ promises or to their past actions? We use a suitable sequence of events in Swedish politics to provide the first answer to this question. In the 1994 election campaign the Social Democrats proposed major cuts in transfers to parents with young children, whereas in the 1998 campaign they promised to increase transfers. The Social Democrats won both elections and delivered on both promises. Using voting among parents with slightly older children as counterfactual, we find that voters with young children responded markedly to economic promises rather than to implemented policies

Why are more redistributive social security systems smaller?

One of the stylized facts of unfunded social security programs is that programs are larger in size, measured relative to the GDP, the tighter the link between pension claims and past earnings. We provide a political economy explanation of this stylized fact in a median voter model, where people vote on the social security tax rate. We compare pension systems with flat-rate and earnings-related benefit formulas. Only flat-rate benefits redistribute within a generation from high to low income groups. If labor supply is endogenous, they also imply larger efficiency costs than earnings-related schemes. Using data on eight European countries, we find that the median voter is typically middle-aged with high income. For these voters, earnings-related systems are more attractive both because of less intragenerational redistribution and lower distortions in labor supply. The median voter model is also able to account for a considerable degree of cross-country variation in contribution rates

On human capital formation with exit options: comment and new results

Human capital formation, Migration, Economic volatility, F22, J24, I21,