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.

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...

Using the Social Security Administration's MINT (Modeling Income in the Near Term) model, this paper calculates the marginal returns to work near retirement, as measured by the increase in benefits associated with an additional year of employment at the end of an individual's work life. With...

In response to a widespread perception that households are undersaving for retirement, policymakers have proposed expanding Social Security and establishing supplementary retirement saving plans run by state governments. But these proposals take place against a background of record-high unfunded...

In this Outlook, I use a detailed microsimulation model of the population to estimate the effects of increasing the Social Security Earliest Eligibility Age (EEA) from sixty-two to sixty-five on Social Security's finances, retirement income, and the economy. Increasing the EEA would extend the...

Using the Social Security Administration's MINT (Modeling Income in the Near Term) model, this paper calculates the marginal returns to work near retirement, as measured by the increase in benefits associated with an additional year of employment at the end of an individual's work life. With...