After a protracted legal and political battle, on March 11, 2011, the Wisconsin state Legislature passed Act 10, the Budget Repair Act, which increased public employee contributions toward pensions and health coverage and restricted union powers of collective bargaining and dues collection. This...

Financial advisors commonly use earnings replacement rates to assist workers in their retirement planning. Policymakers and analysts use them to gauge the adequacy of Social Security benefits and other retirement income in allowing retirees to maintain pre-retirement living standards. In recent...

More than half of U.S. states are working to establish programs what would automatically enrollment in Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) workers who are not offered a retirement plan by their employer. But the designers of state-run auto-IRA plans fail to consider three questions: Do the...

Data from the National Income and Product Accounts published by the US federal government make it possible to analyze the growth of state and local government employee compensation by state.

Studies relying upon household survey data have concluded that public school teachers receive substantially lower salaries than comparably-educated private sector workers. However, any given level of formal educational attainment found in household surveys can encompass a wide range of skills as...

Children consume a substantial portion of a household's income while living at home, but are usually financially independent by the time the parents reach retirement age.

The key insight of the life cycle model in economics is that a household's consumption at any given time is determined not so much by its current income as by the total income available to the household over its lifetime. A replacement rate can be a useful tool in approximating the life cycle...

This paper ranks all 50 states according to how costly their public-employee compensation packages are relative to private-sector standards. Each state's package is placed into one of five categories: modest penalty, market level, modest premium, large premium, or very large premium. The results...