The Joint Decision Making of Married Couples and the Social Security Pension System

The current OASI program redistributes resources from high-wage workers to low-wage workers, and from two-earner couples to one-earner couples. However, previous dynamic general equilibrium analyses of Social Security mostly assume ‘unisex’ individuals, to alleviate complexities in modeling, and they do not consider the redistribution between one-earner and two-earner households. In this project, we extend a standard general equilibrium OLG model with heterogeneous agents, quantitatively analyze the effect of spousal and survivor benefits on the labor supply of married couples, and examine whether the government can improve economic efficiency and social welfare.