Annuities could benefit retirees, but these products can also be costly. Yet, despite significant changes in factors that can affect annuity pricing and value, the money’s worth of individual annuities in the United States has not been addressed in the research literature in 25 years. This...

Over the past few decades, U.S. income inequality has grown, with high earners experiencing disproportionate growth. This pattern has increased the top earners' share of national income and reduced the share of earnings taxable by Social Security from 87.1 percent to 82.7 percent since 1994,...

The release of the Federal Reserve’s 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is a great opportunity to reassess Americans’ retirement preparedness as mea­sured by the National Retirement Risk Index (NRRI). The NRRI shows the share of working-age house­holds who are “at risk” of being...

The brief’s key findings are: *The National Retirement Risk Index framework is used to address how much working-age households need to save for retirement. *A typical household should get a third of its retirement income from a savings plan, with the low income needing one quarter and the high...

This paper examines the impact of the Massachusetts Health Insurance reform of 2016 on job mobility and employment exit using administrative data from the Social Security Administration. The Massachusetts reform mandated that every resident have insurance coverage and facilitated this initiative...

Some observers believe that investing a portion of the Social Security Trust Fund in equities would strengthen its finances and improve the program's intergenerational risk-sharing. However, equity investments would also expose the program to greater financial risk and potentially greater...

Using data from the 1992, 1998, 2004, and 2010 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), this paper compares pension participation, pension wealth, projected retirement income, and replacement rates attributable to past service, by pension type for households ages 51-56. The analysis...