This paper examines the potential impact of government matching contributions on personal-account participation in the President's Commission on Strengthening Social Security's Model 3 for Social Security reform. Given the government's choice of four plan-design parameters, the magnitude of the...

This paper exploits a major mid-1990s expansion in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care system to provide evidence on two important and interrelated U.S. policy issues: retirement policy and universal health care. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we compare the labor...

While the life-cycle hypothesis predicts that consumption remains smooth during the transition from work into retirement, recent studies have shown that consumption declines at retirement. This empirical result has been referred to as the retirement consumption puzzle. Previous literature has...

In order to encourage participation, 401(k) plans increasingly offer loans and withdrawals. This means that more and more families have access to pension funds prior to retirement. The newly released 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances shows that borrowing from pension plans has more than doubled...

Today men on average retire at 63 and women at 62, and they can expect to spend 20 years in retirement. But if Americans continue to retire as early as they do today, many will not have adequate income once they stop working. Social Security will provide less relative to pre-retirement earnings...

The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) prohibits age-based discrimination against older workers through hiring, firing, layoffs, compensation and other conditions of employment. The law covers most workers age 40 and older in firms with 20 or more employees. The question is...

Because most workers receive health benefits from their employers, retirement often disrupts health insurance coverage. Some employers offer health insurance to retirees, but many firms are cutting retiree health benefits by passing more costs to retirees or eliminating benefits altogether. Few...

Today, the average retirement age is 63. If people continue to retire at 63, they are going to face a severe decline in living standards at retirement for a number of reasons. First, at any given retirement age, Social Security benefits will replace less of pre-retirement earnings as the Normal...

In 1998, the Swedish Parliament passed pension legislation that transformed Sweden's Social Security system to a Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) plan 3/4 that is, a defined contribution plan financed on a pay-as-you-go basis. In addition, the legislature established a second tier of funded...

Employer-provided pensions play an important role in assuring a comfortable retirement. In 1992, they accounted for about 20 percent of the total wealth of middle-income households aged 51-61, second only to Social Security. However, many workers still lack pension coverage. After increasing...