We revisit the role of social security in countering inadequate saving for retirement. We compute the optimal social security tax rate for households who lack the computational ability to solve dynamic optimization problems. Instead, they follow the simple rule of thumb of consuming and saving a...

While standard models assume households have no trouble planning for retirement, some researchers have argued that households vary in their propensity to plan and that the degree of retirement planning is a key determinant of household saving (Lusardi and Mitchell 2007). As a result, there is...

We present a rule-of-thumb consumption model with participation in a Save More Tomorrow (SMarT) plan, and we analytically derive the fraction of life-cycle wage increases that must be saved to offset a reduction in social security benefits resulting from an aging population (holding taxes fixed...