Conference on Income and Wealth to be held in Washington, D. C., Spring 1998

该项目分析了社会保障计划的经济和政治设计特点。它包括建立一个大型的跨国家和时间序列数据集，衡量方案设计的各个维度、社会保障管理机构的规模及其组成部分以及其他相关的经济和社会措施，如退休模式和老年政治参与。初步分析揭示了各国之间的一些经验规律。这项研究的四个发现是：(1)老年福利资格几乎总是取决于一个人的劳动力市场地位，(2)老年福利资格很少取决于一个人的财富，(3)社会保障的增长似乎超过了退休老年人口或国民收入的增长，(4)退休老年公民似乎比年轻人更致力于政治活动。这些规律性表明，无论是理论分析还是实证分析，都需要将社会保障管理的起源和发展与劳动力市场和退休老年人的政治行为联系起来。该项目将在各个维度扩展数据集。调查人员将在若干年和更大范围的国家范围内扩大制度和“设计”变量，包括更精细和更全面的社会保障方案以及退休年龄人的退休模式，并包括政治、法律和经济制度的衡量标准。私人投资促进机构还将构建政治参与“强度”的衡量标准，并将时间密集型参与与金钱密集型参与分开。该项目还将调查“压力群体”和其他集体选择模式，这些模式可能解释为什么退休老年人能够从年轻人那里领取养老金，以及为什么这些养老金具有上述资格要求和其他特征。对一个特定群体的政治权力取决于用于政治活动的时间的模型的初步分析表明，退休年龄的人有动机引入数据中观察到的诱导退休的规定，这将减少他们自己群体成员的时间价值。这反过来又扩大了他们的政治权力，并将允许他们从年轻人那里获得更多的转移。该模型解释了为什么养老金制度诱导退休老年人退休，为什么社会保障计划的规模似乎与退休老年人工作的限制数量有关，为什么退休老年人对政治更感兴趣，以及为什么他们将更大比例的时间投入到政治活动中。

The project analyzes economic and political design features of social security programs. It includes the construction of a large cross country and time series data set measuring various dimensions of program design, the size of social security administrations and their components as well as other related economic and social measures such as retirement patterns and old age political participation. A preliminary analysis uncovers a number of empirical regularities across countries. Four of those findings of the study are: (1) old age benefit eligibility almost always depends on a person's labor market status, (2) old age benefit eligibility rarely depends on a person's wealth, (3) social security appears to grow more than could be accounted by the growth of the retirement aged population or national income, (4) retirement aged citizens appear to devote more effort to political activities than do the young. These regularities indicates that both theoretical and the empirical analyses need to relate social the origin and growth of the social security administration to labor markets and to the political behavior of the retirement aged. The project will expand the data sets in various dimensions. The investigators will expand the institutional and `design` variables for a number of years and for a larger cross section of countries, include finer and more comprehensive measures of social security programs as well as retirement patterns of the retirement aged, and include measures of political, legal, and economic institutions. The PIs will also construct measures of `intensity` of political participation and separate the time intensive from the money intensive forms of participation. The project will also investigate `pressure group` and other models of collective choice that might explain why the retirement aged are able to get pensions from the young and why those pension have the eligibility requirements and other features mentioned above. A preliminary analysis of a model where the political power of a particular group depends on the amount of time devoted to political activities, the investigatorrs show that the retirement aged have incentives to introduce retirement inducing regulations like the ones observed in the data, which will reduce the value of the time of the members of their own group. This, in turn, enlarges their political power and will allow them to extract more transfers from the young. The model explains why the pension system induces the retirement aged to retire, why the size of the social security program appears to be related to the amount of restrictions on the work of the retirement aged, why the retirement aged are more interested in politics, and why they devote a larger fraction of their time to political activities.