Social Security in an Overlapping Generations Economy with Land

Abstract

We use balance sheet and National Income and Products Accounts (NIPA) data to calibrate factor shares in a model with three factors (land, labor, and capital) and three sectors (business, household, and government). These estimates are used in an overlapping generations model with land to study the long-run implications for social security. In this setup, dynamic inefficiency is theoretically ruled out due to the presence of land as a fixed factor of production. Our numerical experiments suggest that in this setup the partial insurance benefit provided by an unfunded social security system is outweighed by the reduction in aggregate long-run consumption that accompanies such a system. This negative finding for social security seems to be robust to different parameterizations of the model economy. (Copyright: Elsevier)