Social Security

The booms and busts of the late 1990s and 2000s have taken 401(k) plan participants on a rollercoaster ride. Using data from administrative tax records and household surveys, this paper examines how participants responded to these periods of economic expansions and contractions by documenting changes in 401(k) participation, contributions, and investment allocation from 1990 through 2010. Controlling for earnings, job changes, and other household factors, we show that 401(k) participation and contributions decline during recessions. The Great Recession could lower the 401(k) assets of the typical 30-year-old by as much as 9 percent at age 62.

This study uses restricted microdata from the National Compensation Survey to examine the impact of autoenrollment on employee compensation. By boosting plan participation, automatic enrollment likely increases employer costs as previously unenrolled workers receive matching retirement plan contributions. Our data shows significant negative correlation between employer match rates and automatic enrollment provision. We find no evidence that total costs differ between firms with and without automatic enrollment, and no evidence that DC costs crowd out other forms of compensation—suggesting that firms might be lowering their potential and/or default match rates enough to completely offset the higher costs of automatic enrollment without needing to reduce other compensation costs.

Policy changes intended to delay retirements of older workers and extend their work lives may run up against demand-side barriers from age discrimination, and supply-side barriers owing to rising physical challenges of work as people age. We study three questions. How do age discrimination protections affect labor market transitions of workers encouraged to work longer by increases in Social Security's Full Retirement Age (FRA)? How do physical challenges at work influence employment transitions of older workers for whom public policy is trying to delay retirement? And what role do stronger age discrimination protections play in helping workers facing physical challenges at work?
We find that stronger state age discrimination protections increase employment and hiring for older workers caught by increases in the FRA. We also find that physical challenges pose a barrier to extending work lives, although some workers with physically-demanding jobs are able to mitigate these demands—either at new jobs or with the same employer. However, for the most part stronger age discrimination protections do not appear to contribute to older workers' ability to mitigate physical challenges at work.

Workers over age 55 with chronic health conditions must choose between applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits or continuing to work until their Social Security retirement benefits become available. Previous research has investigated the influence of macroeconomic conditions on disability application and, separately, on retirement claiming. This project uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation Gold Standard File to determine whether there is a relationship between national and state unemployment rates and disability applications, taking into account the current or future receipt of Social Security retirement benefits. First, reduced-form estimates indicate that retirement beneficiaries are more likely to apply for SSDI as unemployment increases—and, conversely, eligible individuals who have not yet claimed benefits are less likely to apply when unemployment rises. But after accounting for unobserved characteristics associated with both the decision to apply for disability insurance and Social Security benefits, individuals are no more likely to apply for disability benefits when unemployment is high. Second, we find that the probability of SSDI application among individuals age 55–61 is unrelated to macroeconomic conditions and unrelated to proximity to one's 62nd birthday. These results suggest that, unlike prime-age adults, the decision among older individuals to apply for disability is based primarily on health, and not financial incentives.

We develop a model of health investments and consumption over the life cycle where health affects longevity, provides flow utility, and retirement is endogenous. We develop a rich, numerical life-cycle model to study the complex interrelationship between health and wealth and the age of retirement. The decision to retire depends on a number of factors including earnings and health shocks, demographic characteristics, preferences, pensions, and social security. We incorporate these features in a computational model of optimal wealth and retirement decisions, solving the model household-by-household using data from the HRS. We use the model to study how workers would respond to an increase in the early eligibility age of retirement (EEA), and to what extent will the bad economy alter retirement plans. We find that increasing the EEA results in sizeable responses to the age of retirement but does not affect health outcomes very much. A 20 percent reduction in wealth induces households to delay retirement by one year, on average, with poor households being relatively unaffected.

The rapid transition from defined benefit (DB) pension plans to defined contribution (DC) plans has a potential benefit of offering pension holders greater control over how their pension accumulations are invested. If pension holders are willing to take some risk, investments in the stock market could increase their economic preparation for retirement, and, indeed, economic theory as well as the typical advice of financial advisors calls for stock market investments. Yet, the rate of stock holding is much below what theory suggests it should be, undoing any benefit associated with the greater control coming from DC plans. The leading explanations for this under-investing include excessive risk aversion, costs of entry, and misperceptions about possible returns in the stock market. We show that excessive risk aversion is not able to account for the low fraction of stock holding. However, a model with heterogeneous subjective expectations about stock market returns is able to account for low stock market participation, and tracks the share of risky assets conditional on participation reasonably well. Based on the model with subjective expectations, we estimate a welfare loss of up to 12% compared to investment under rational expectations, if actual returns follow the same distribution as in the past 50 years. The policy implication is that there is considerable scope for welfare improvement as a result of consumer education regarding stock market returns. However, the welfare loss is much smaller if individuals are not very risk averse or if actual returns follow the same distribution as in the past 10 years.

A review of the literature suggests that when pension values are measured by the wealth equivalent of promised DB pension benefits and DC balances for those approaching retirement, pensions account for more support in retirement than is suggested when their contribution is measured by incomes received directly from pension plans by those who have already retired. Estimates from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) for respondents in their early fifties suggest that pension wealth is about 86 percent as valuable as Social Security wealth. In data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), for members of the same cohort, measured when they are 65 to 69, pension incomes are about 56 percent as valuable as incomes from Social Security. Our empirical analysis uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the reasons for these differences in the contributions of pensions as measured in income and wealth data.
A number of factors cause the contribution of pensions to be understated in retirement income data, especially data from the CPS. One factor is a difference in methodology between surveys affecting what is included in pension income, especially in the CPS, which ignores irregular payments from pensions. In CPS data on incomes of those ages 64 to 69 in 2006, pension values are 59 percent of the value of Social Security. For the same cohort, in HRS data, the pension value is 67 percent of the value of Social Security benefits. Some pension wealth "disappears" at retirement because respondents change their pension into other forms that are not counted as pension income in surveys of income. Altogether, 16 percent of pension wealth is transformed into some other form at the time of disposition. For those who had a defined benefit pension just before termination, the dominant plan type for current retirees, at termination 12 percent of the benefit was transformed into a state that would not count as pension income after retirement. For those who receive benefits soon after termination, there is a 3.5 percent reduction in DB pension value at termination compared to the year before termination. One reason may be the form of annuitization that is chosen. A series of caveats notwithstanding, the bottom line is that CPS data on pension incomes received in retirement understates the full contribution pensions make to supporting retirees.

The life-cycle model of household behavior forms the basis for most economic analysis of Social Security, private pensions, and retirement. This project seeks to extend the usefulness of the life-cycle model by considering the role of middle-class inheritances and bequests. We use HRS data. Prior work by the authors identifies key information in the HRS on the sources of private intergenerational transfers, and it shows that the frequency of couples' inheritances from both spouses' family lines is higher than random behavior would imply. Using additional HRS data on the ratio of parent-to-child lifetime incomes, we analyze the motives behind HRS bequests. We find support for an unintentional transfer model in which bequests arise from residual, unspent parent life-cycle resources. And, we show that our model can account for the frequency of dual inheritances that earlier work revealed.

Taxes impact individual labor supply decisions. A vast literature studies the ramifications of income taxes on hours worked, occupational choice, and labor force participation for the working age population. There is little work, however, on the tax responsiveness of labor supply decisions for older individuals. We have little evidence about the importance of income and payroll taxes on the labor supply of this population. However, this is a group that is potentially very responsive to the incentives generated by the tax schedule. Our work fills a major gap in the literature by studying the effect that taxes have on both the intensive and extensive labor supply decisions of older workers. We use longitudinal data and legislative tax changes to understand the impact that taxes can have on the labor supply decisions of older workers. Studying workers ages 55–74, we find that increases in the marginal tax rate are associated with reductions in labor earnings for women. Our strongest results show that both men and women respond to tax-driven changes in after-tax labor income. More generous tax schedules lead to statistically significant and economically meaningful changes in the fraction of people working, and we find similar effects for both men and women. Our analysis also estimates that taxes have significant effects on the retirement behavior of men, but we find less evidence that it affects women on this dimension. Overall, our research finds strong evidence that tax policy impacts the labor supply decisions of older workers.

The rising cost of U.S. health care has reduced the share of compensation that is taxable by Social Security. Between 1960 and 2010 non-taxable employer premiums for worker health plans increased from 1 percent to 7 percent of employee compensation. We use international data to examine the determinants of trends in health care spending and the reasons that the U.S. experience has differed from that of other high-income countries. In 2010 the share of U.S. GDP devoted to health care was 7.2 percentage points higher than the share in other rich countries. We document the growth of this gap in the past 5 decades. Much of it developed between 1980 and the mid-1990s, though we also find another episode of out-size growth in the early 2000s. We identify six countries, including most of Scandinavia, that have seen a slowdown in health spending growth. These were also countries that had higher-than-expected health spendin! g, given their average incomes, in the 1960s and 1970s. The slowdown in their health expenditure growth may simply reflect a reversion of their spending toward the OECD mean. We find no mean reversion in U.S. health spending growth. Our review of other literature suggests that the current excess in U.S. health costs is mainly traceable to higher prices for health care goods and services. Compared with other OECD countries, the U.S. has been slow to develop institutions or global budget constraints that restrain the pace of health cost growth.