You Better Get Married! Marital Status and Intra-Generational Redistribution of Social Security

Max Groneck, Matthias Schön and Johanna Wallenius

VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: In this paper, we study the intra-generational redistribution of the U.S. social security system in a dynamic, structural life cycle model of couples with uncertain marital status and survival risk. We focus particularly on auxiliary benefits, namely spousal and survivor benefits, where eligibility is directly linked to marital status. We show that marital stability increases strongly with income, leading to redistribution from the bottom to the top. We evaluate the impact of auxiliary social security benefits on both the poverty rate of the elderly and on household labor supply.

JEL-codes: D91 E62 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dge and nep-mac
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc16:145801

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