Our findings suggest that although the consequences of the decline in the stock market are serious for those approaching their retirement, the average person approaching retirement age is not likely to suffer a life changing financial loss from the stock market downturn of 2008-2009. Similarly,...

How does retirement influence subjective well-being? Some studies suggest retirement does not affect subjective well-being or may improve it. Others suggest it adversely affects it. This paper aims at advancing our understanding of the effect of retirement on subjective well-being by (1) using...

This paper further extends our efforts to understand how household decision making works and the relation of decisions made within the household to incentives from Social Security and pensions. A structural model of family retirement decision making is estimated using U.S. data from the Health...

The current U.S. Social Security program redistributes resources from high wage workers to low wage workers and from two-earner couples to one-earner couples. The present paper extends a standard general-equilibrium overlapping-generations model with uninsurable wage shocks to analyze the effect...

In April of 2013, the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania convened a Technical Review Panel, comprising ten experts whose task it was to review the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation's (PBGC) Pension Insurance Modeling System (PIMS), including...

Though millions of US workers have 401(k) plans, few studies evaluate participant investment performance. Using data on over 1,000 401(k) plans and their participants, we identify key portfolio investment inefficiencies and attribute them to offered investment menus versus individual portfolio...

Germany still has a very generous public pay-as-you-go pension system. It is characterized by early effective retirement ages and very high effective replacement rates. Most workers receive virtually all of their retirement income from this public retirement insurance. Costs are almost 12% of...

This paper studies the long-run implications for national wealth accumulation of potential changes in the U.S. social security system or in the size of the U.S. national debt. Privatization of a portion of the existing (unfunded) U.S. social security system would, if the national debt were held...

State and local government pension plans cover about 19.5 million participants, and many participants are heavily reliant on these pensions for retirement income. Most of these plans, however, are underfunded. Based on data from the Health and Retirement Study, we examined the lifetime work...

We present stochastic forecasts of the Social Security trust fund by modeling key demographic and economic variables as historical time series, and using the fitted models to generate computer simulations of future fund performance. We evaluate several plans for achieving long-term solvency by...