Distribution of Benefits in Teacher Retirement Systems and Their Implications...
Defined benefit pension systems concentrate benefits on career teachers and impose costs on mobile teachers. This study analyzes the magnitude of these effects. Compared to a neutral system, often...
View ArticleSocial Security and the Budget
In contrast to rising health care and interests costs, Social Security's growing benefits relative to taxes received represent only a modest part of the nation's major fiscal problems. Nonetheless,...
View ArticleDistributional Effects of Alternative Social Security Reforms: Details Matter
Social Security's current path is unsustainable. With average life spans increasing, the working-age population is not growing fast enough to support the growing number of retirees at current benefit...
View ArticleHow Middle-Age Retirement Adds to Recession Woes
Expressed in various forms, the idea is that baby boomers' retirement isn't really a problem until the economy fully revives, that people in late middle age should quit to make room for younger...
View ArticleAre Early Withdrawals from Retirement Accounts a Problem?
Both adverse and investment events can trigger early withdrawals from retirement accounts. About 40 percent of retirement savings losses can be linked to these types of events, which include...
View ArticleUnderstanding Early Withdrawals from Retirement Accounts
Less-advantaged individuals are less likely to have IRAs and 401(k)s, and those who do are more likely to withdraw savings before retirement. About 40 percent of withdrawals can be linked to adverse or...
View ArticleRacial, Ethnic, and Gender Differentials in Employer-Sponsored Pensions :...
The best approaches to narrowing racial, ethnic, and gender differentials in retirement wealth are outside the current employer-sponsored pension system, Barbara Butrica and Richard Johnson told the...
View ArticleRaising Social Security's Retirement Age
Increasing Social Security's retirement age would promote work at older ages, improve the system's solvency by shortening retirements and reducing lifetime benefits, and better target benefits to the...
View ArticleOlder Workers: Opportunities and Challenges
Improved health, educational gains, and declines in physically demanding work have improved employment prospects at older ages, yet significant challenges remain. This fact sheet reports key data...
View ArticleAdjusting Social Security Benefits for Changes in the Cost of Living
This brief examines different price indices that might be used to adjust Social Security benefits for changes in the cost of living. The currently used consumer price index for wage and clerical...
View ArticleWorkers with Low Social Security Benefits: Implications for Reform
Low Social Security benefits are strongly related to individual characteristics and earnings histories. These associations suggest ways of shoring up Social Security and adopting other policies to help...
View ArticleWhy Do Some Workers Have Low Social Security Benefits?
We use data from the Health and Retirement Study linked to administrative data on earnings and benefits to determine why some workers end up with low Social Security benefits in retirement. Several...
View ArticleWork and Retirement Patterns for the G.I. Generation, Silent Generation, and...
This study comparing retirement patterns over the past 30 years finds that older adults are now working longer and taking more complex routes out of the labor force. More than 40 percent of men born...
View ArticleBasic Facts on Social Security
Social Security is America's favorite government program. The program paid over $615 billion in benefits to over 50 million retired and disabled workers, their dependents, and their survivors in 2008.
View ArticleLowering the Heat Around Raising Retirement Age
In commentary for the San Francisco Chronicle, Gene Steuerle asserts that all of the following myths about Social Security retirement ages are wrong: (1) increasing the retirement age will reduce...
View ArticleRetirement and Social Security: A Time Series Approach Based on Remaining...
Traditional analyses of retirement decisions focus on the age, from birth, of the individual making choices about how much to work, consume, and save for old age. However, remaining life expectancy is...
View ArticleWhy We Must Untie Our Fiscal Straightjacket: A Response to Henry J. Aaron
Eugene Steuerles response Henry Aaron in a point-counterpoint debate about Americas fiscal struggles. This discourse includes agreement and disagreement, yet is honestly presented without the noise and...
View ArticleAmerica's Related Fiscal Problems
In a point-counterpoint with Henry Aaron, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Eugene Steuerle discusses five pressing fiscal problems facing America, and suggests tax and budget reform options...
View ArticleThe Future of Social Security: Solvency, Work, Adequacy, and Equity
Social Security faces a $5.4 trillion shortfall over the next 75 years, but modest adjustments can halt that slide. Some argue that those adjustments should go beyond solvency, to improve the adequacy...
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