In many countries, social security accounts for a large fraction of the government budget. Why is this so, given that at any point in time the number of recipients of social security benefits is smaller than the number of contributors? In the overlapping-generations model studied in this paper, all individuals currently alive vote on social security in every period. In equilibrium, the size of social security is larger, the greater is the proportion of elderly people in the population, and the greater is the inequality of pre-tax income within each generation. Both predictions of the theory are supported by the empirical evidence in cross-country data. Copyright 2000 by The editors of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 102 (2000) Issue (Month): 3 (June) Pages: 523-45 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.
Did you know? You can import bibliographic info in various formats into you bibliographic tool, or just into your word processor. See under "publisher info" on each abstract page.