In theory, improvements in healthy life expectancy should generate increases in the average age of retirement, with little effect on savings rates. In many countries, however, retirement incentives in social security programs prevent retirement ages from keeping pace with changes in life...

Social Security trust fund portfolio diversification to include some equities reduces the equity premium by raising the safe real interest rate. This requires changes in taxes. Under the hypothesis of constant marginal returns to risky investments, trust fund diversification lowers the price of...

A program of Personal Retirement Accounts (PRAs) funded by deposits equal to 2.3 percent of earnings (up to the Social Security maximum) would permit retirees to receive more income in retirement than with the current Social Security program while at the same time making it unnecessary to...

Pensions may contribute to male/female or black/white inequality to the extent that white males are more likely to receive pensions than are other groups. Conditional on receiving pensions, the value of pension benefits varies because white males have the highest level of expected tenure...

The manifest purposes of integrating an employer-provided pension plan with social security are:(1) to ensure retirement income adequacy for all covered employees; and (2) to ensure retirement income equity, defined as equal total replacement rates for all employees regardless of salary level....

Recent and proposed changes in the social security statutes can have profound effects on worker behavior and on pensions themselves. In the context of an optimal lifetime compensation plan, pensions depend on efficient dates of retirement. To the extent that changes in social security affect the...

An economic theory of public and private pensions is developed, and the implications of the theory are compared with some empirical evidence, of both the econometric and casual varieties. Among the questions addressed are: why are there private pensions? why have they grown so rapidly in recent...

We consider the retirement behavior of civilian employees of the United States government. Unlike previous studies, this investigation is based upon a data set containing fairly complete and accurate information about the Social Security and employer-provided pensions for which employees are (or...

We propose a general analytical framework to model the redistributive features of alternative pension systems when individuals face ex ante differences in mortality. Differences in life expectancy between high and low socioeconomic groups are often large and have widened recently in many...

This paper estimates a structural model of family retirement using U.S. data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and from the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women. Estimates using the HRS benefit from having, for each spouse, earnings histories provided by the respondent and the...