This study examines empirically whether social security influences the retirement decisions of individuals. The framework for this study is the life-cycle model of individual behavior. The life-cycle model shows that there are two main ways in which social security can affect behavior. One way...

The effect of social security and other forms of government debt on national savings is one of the most widely debated policy questions in economics today. Some estimates suggest that social security has reduced U.S. savings by almost forty percent. This paper examines recent cross-section and...

This paper studies the asset holdings of white American men near retirement age. Assets as conventional defined show no tendency to decline with age, in apparent contradiction of the life-cycle theory of saving. However, a broadened concept of assets which includes expected future pension...

In a 1974 paper in the Journal of Political Economy I discussed the theoretical ambiguity of the effect of social security on private saving and presented statistical evidence that social security does on balance depress saving. Recently, an error was detected in the computer program that was...

This paper shows that, contrary to commonly held views, the provisions of the social security law actually provide strong work incentives for older men. The reason is that, for most workers, higher current earnings lead to higher future social security benefits. These incentives have been...

In the last twenty years the labor force participation rates of 45 to 54-year-old men have fallen 10.6 percentage points among non-whites and 4.4 percentage points among whites. I find that nearly half of this puzzling decline can be explained by the growth of the Social Security Disability...

The U.S. Social Security Administration, in cooperation with similar agencies in other countries, recently developed estimates of social security benefits for twelve major industrial countries. The present paper uses these data to estimate the effects of social security benefits on saving and...

This paper, which was presented as the 1979 Frank Paish Lecture to the British Association of University Teachers of Economics, provides a non-technical summary of the recent studies of the effects of social security on private saving. The first section discusses the theoretical indeterminacy of...

This study examines the impact of social security on the retirement of married men aged 60-70 years. The empirical results are based on a rich file of data from the Social Security Administration (1973 CPS-IRS-SSA Exact Match File). The data permit precise calculation of social security wealth...

The distribution of wealth is one of the most important and least studied features of our economic life. A lack of good data on household wealth is the primary reason for the inadequate attention to this subject. Moreover, the evidence that is available from household surveys and estate records...