How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2004, the German pension authority started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system...

Typical neoclassical life-cycle models predict that Social Security has a large and negative effect on private savings. We review this theoretical literature by constructing a model where individuals face uninsurable longevity risk and differ by wage earnings, while Social Security provides...

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, 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 paper reviews the studies by Robert Barro, Michael Darby, and Alicia Munnell, as well as my own earlier time-series study and presents new estimates using the revised national income-account data. The basic estimates of each of the four studies point to an economically substantial effect...

Attempts to measure the impacts of pensions on household saving have occupied much of the literature in empirical public finance over the past decade. The emphasis here is on the annuity insurance aspects of social security and pensions. A simple life-cycle model is put forth to show that even...

While the short-run financial status of Social Security is secure, its long-run financial status is very uncertain. The retirement and disability part of the system (OASDI) is projected to be in long-run actuarial deficit under the Social Security Administration's intermediate economic and...

We analyze a Bewley-Huggett-Aiyagari incomplete-markets model with labor-market frictions. Consumers are subject to idiosyncratic employment shocks against which they cannot insure directly. The labor market has a Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides structure: firms enter by posting vacancies and match...

An enhanced version of a structural model jointly explains benefit claiming, wealth and retirement, including reversals from states of lesser to greater work. The model includes stochastic returns on assets. Estimated with Health and Retirement Study data, it does a better job of predicting...

In the presence of uncertain lifetimes, social security has the characteristics of an annuity: a consumer pays a tax when young in exchange for receiving a social security benefit if he survives to be old. If consumers have identical ex ante mortality probabilities, then a fully funded social...