Subjective financial assessments are used by social scientists as a measure of financial well-being and by households as the basis for action. Financial well-being, however, increasingly requires workers to build-up savings to meet hard-to-see future needs, specifically retirement, their...

State and local government pension reform has become a front-burner issue in the wake of the economic crisis, which sharply reduced funded ratios for most plans. Policymakers have responded primarily by raising employee contributions for all workers and/or reducing benefits for new workers. One...

People often ask how baby boomers compare with their parents in terms of being prepared for retirement. The easiest way to answer that question is to look at the ratio of wealth to income from the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), the Federal Reserve’s comprehensive triennial survey of...

This year, Social Security benefits received no Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) for the first time since automatic adjustments were adopted in 1975. While current beneficiaries perceive themselves to be harmed, they were compensated by receiving a higher-than-normal 5.8-percent COLA payment in...

Municipal bond prices are tumbling and rates rising just as public borrowers face pressure to refinance deals cut during the financial crisis. At the same time, the funded status of public pension plans has declined, and states and localities will have to come up with more money to meet future...

Many workers nearing retirement experienced a dramatic decrease in their retirement assets when the stock market crashed in 2008. In order to maintain their expected standard of living in retirement, workers needed to work longer, save more, or do both. To measure the response of older workers...

With the leading edge of the baby boom generation reaching retirement age, decisionmakers need a comprehensive understanding of their social, economic, and health characteristics – both in terms of resources and needs – in order to adopt effective public policies and private services to meet...

This paper explores life insurance holdings from a general equilibrium perspective. Drawing on the data explored in Chambers, Schlagenhauf, and Young (2003), we calibrate an overlapping generation’s life cycle economy with incomplete asset markets to match facts regarding the uncertainty of...

The inclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) in taxable income would increase income and payroll tax receipts, but would also increase Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) benefits by adding ESI to the OASDI earnings base. This study uses the Urban Institute’s...

Using a unique dataset of 401(k) trades, this paper’s results suggest that in most cases only equity fund outflows, not inflows, are significantly related to their own past fund returns. Also, the strong correlation between flows and lagged returns is only significant when fund returns are...