Thanks to recent changes in the tax law, people can contribute more to their tax-deductible and non-tax-deductible savings plans, including 401(k) and Roth IRAs. But should they? The myriad interacting provisions of the tax code make it difficult to predict who will gain from government savings...

Using data on older workers from the 1992 Health and Retirement Survey, along with an elaborate life-cycle planning model, the authors quantify the effect of each individual's death on the financial status of his or her survivors and the degree to which life insurance holdings moderate these...

An application of generational accounting to fiscal policies that feature intergenerational redistribution. The authors consider different policies, only some of which show up as a change in the deficit, and explore their impact on the net national saving rate.

The authors consider Social Security’s treatment of postwar Americans under alternative tax increases and benefit cuts that would help bring the system’s finances into present-value balance. The alternatives include immediate tax increases, eliminating the ceiling on taxable payroll,...

Using the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances and an elaborate lifecycle model, we quantify the potential financial impact of each individual’s death on his or her survivors, and we measure the degree to which life insurance moderates these consequences. Life insurance is essentially uncorrelated...

An application of the generational accounting method of fiscal policy analysis to projected spending paths for Social Security and Medicare suggesting that, under realistic assumptions for these programs, future generations as well as current young Americans could bear a significantly larger...

An analysis of the postwar decline in U.S. national saving that decomposes changes in the net national saving rate into those due to changes in cohort-specific consumption propensities, the intergenerational distribution of resources, the rate of government spending, and demographics. ; A review...

A presentation of a set of generational accounts that can be used as an alternative to the federal budget deficit in assessing intergenerational policy, concluding that the fiscal burdens on future generations will be significantly larger than those on existing generations if current tax policy...

This study examines life insurance adequacy among married American couples approaching retirement based on the 1992 Health and Retirement Survey with matched Social Security earnings histories. It evaluates each household's life insurance needs based on new financial planning software that...

Does it pay to work? This is a tough question because of the complexity of the tax code and the plethora of dynamic linkages involved: 1) Earning more today typically alters current saving and, therefore, future capital income taxes. 2) Earning more today generally alters future consumption and,...