It Sucks to Be Single! Marital Status and Redistribution of Social Security

Max Groneck and Johanna Wallenius

No 2017:1, SSE Working Paper Series in Economics from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: In this paper, we study the labor supply effects and the redistributional consequences of the U.S. social security system. We focus particularly on auxiliary benefits, where eligibility is linked to marital status. To this end, we develop a dynamic, structural life cycle model of singles and couples, featuring uncertain marital status and survival. We account for the socio-economic gradients to both marriage stability and life expectancy. We find that auxiliary benefits have a large depressing effect on married women's employment. Moreover, we show that a revenue neutral minimum benefit scheme would moderately reduce inequality relative to the current U.S. system.

Keywords: Social Security; Spousal and Survivor Benefits; Marital Risk; Female Labor Supply; Redistribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 E62 H55 J12 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2017-02-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Journal Article: It Sucks to Be Single! Marital Status and Redistribution of Social Security (2021)
Working Paper: It Sucks to Be Single! Marital Status and Redistribution of Social Security (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:hastec:2017_001

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