The current U.S. Social Security program redistributes resources from high-wage workers to low-wage workers through its progressive benefit schedule and from two-earner couples and singles to one-earner couples through its spousal and survivors benefits. This paper extends a standard general-equilibrium overlapping-generations model with uninsurable wage shocks to analyze the effect of the spousal and survivors benefits on the labor supply of married households and the overall economy. The

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... ogeneousagent model calibrated to the current U.S. economy predicts that, in the long run, removing spousal and survivors benefits would increase the female labor participation rate by 1.4%, the total working hours of women by 1.6-1.7%, and the total output of the economy by 0.5-0.6%. Under the balanced-budget assumption, a phased-in cohort-by-cohort removal of these benefits would make all age cohorts, on average, better off, although the policy change would make a majority of young married households worse off in the short run. JEL Classification Numbers: D91, E62, H55.