October 2017

16Oct

How the Growing Gap in Life Expectancy May Affect Retirement Benefits and Reforms

By Alan J. Auerbach, Kerwin K. Charles, Courtney C. Coile, William Gale, Dana Goldman, Ronald Lee, Charles M. Lucas, Peter R. Orszag, Louise M. Sheiner, Bryan Tysinger, David N. Weil, Justin Wolfers, Rebeca Wong Older Americans have experienced dramatic gains in life expectancy in recent decades, but an emerging literature reveals that these gains are accumulating mostly to those at the top of the income distribution. We explore how growing inequality in life expectancy affects lifetime benefits from Social Security,...

October 16, 2017
Articles, Funding, Labor Market, Regulation,
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08Oct

Is There a Retirement Crisis? Examining Retirement Planning in the Household and Government Sectors

By Andrew G. Biggs (American Enterprise Institute) In response to a widespread perception that households are undersaving for retirement, policymakers have proposed expanding Social Security and establishing supplementary retirement saving plans run by state governments. But these proposals take place against a background of record-high unfunded liabilities for government-run retirement programs. If government entities have either financial or political difficulty funding their existing obligations to retirees, shifting greater retirement provision from households to government could potentially worsen existing shortfalls in...

October 8, 2017
Articles, Funding, Savings, System Sustainability, ,
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May 2017
14May

The Importance of Social Security Benefits to the Income of the Aged Population

By Irena Dushi & Howard Iams (US Social Security Administration); Brad Trenkamp (Government of the United States of America) Social Security benefits comprise the most important source of income for people aged 65 and over. However, changes in the last decades in employer-provided pensions, Social Security program, and societal changes may have altered the composition of income sources among the elderly. Some researchers have argued that the Current Population Survey (CPS ASEC) doesn’t properly measure income from retirement accounts and...

May 14, 2017
Aging, Articles, Labor Market, ,
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01May

Population Aging, Social Security and Fiscal Limits

By Burkhard Heer (University of Augsburg), Vito Polito (University of Bath) & Michael R. Wickens (University of Cardiff) We study the sustainability of pension systems using a life-cycle model with distortionary taxation that sets an upper limit to the real value of tax revenues. This limit implies an endogenous threshold dependency ratio, i.e. a point in the cross-section distribution of the population beyond which tax revenues can no longer sustain the planned level of transfers to retirees. We quantify the...

May 1, 2017
Aging, Articles, System Sustainability,
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February 2017

28Feb

Social Security and the Rise in Health Spending

By Kai Zhao (University of Connecticut) Abstract:     In a quantitative model of Social Security with endogenous health, I argue that Social Security increases the aggregate health spending of the economy because it redistributes resources to the elderly whose marginal propensity to spend on health is high. I show by using computational experiments that the expansion of US Social Security can account for over a third of the dramatic rise in US health spending from 1950 to 2000. In addition,...

February 28, 2017
Aging, Articles, Savings, , ,
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