The goal of this paper is to carefully document the characteristics of within-family monetary transfers in the United States, using all nine waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The main purpose of doing so is to summarize the relevant moments that can be used as calibration targets...

In this paper we analyze the effect of Social Security regime changes on labor force participation of 50-80-year-old men across and within 13 countries: Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Chile, France, Greece, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and the United States. Labor force...

The financial crisis and ensuing recession have had an enormous impact on state-administered pension plans. Funded levels declined sharply, the Annual Required Contribution (ARC) increased to make up for the fall in funding, and the percent of ARC paid declined as the bottom fell out of state...

The Census Bureau just reported a large increase in poverty in the United States. Driven by job loss and long-term unemployment, the poverty rate rose from 13.2 percent to 14.3 percent, as 3.7 million more Americans found themselves with incomes below the poverty threshold.1 Individuals aged...

State and local pensions have been headline news since the financial collapse reduced the value of their assets, leaving a substantial unfunded liability. The magnitude of that liability depends on the interest rate used to discount future benefit promises but, regardless of the assumptions,...

This 2012 update on the funded status of state/local pensions will be one of the last two based on the Governmental Accounting Standards Board’s(GASB) old provisions, under which assets are reported on an actuarially smoothed basis, the discount rate is the long-run expected rate of return,...

When job opportunities decline due to a weak economy, application rates for Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) typically rise. At the same time, prior research has found that allowance rates – the percent of applicants who are awarded benefits – tend to fall, perhaps because more of...

Rapid growth in the earnings of the highest earners over the past two and a half decades has contributed to strains on Social Security’s finances and made projecting lifetime earnings on a year-by-year basis – already a complicated technical problem – even more challenging. This project...

Understanding the role that 401(k) plan characteristics – like investment choice – play in participation and employee contributions is important as more workers rely on this type of retirement plan and proposals for Social Security solvency include individual savings plans. Using the 1992...

Despite being well recognized by economists as an important social and economic force, private transfers are still little understood, and considerable debate surrounds basic questions, such as whether or how private and public transfers might interact. Nearly all empirical work to date has...