[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crr/crrwps/wp2004-10.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Lifetime Earnings, Social Security Benefits, and the Adequacy of Retirement Wealth Accumulation

Author

Listed:
  • Eric M. Engen
  • William G. Gale
  • Cori E. Uccello
Abstract
This paper provides new evidence on the adequacy of household retirement saving. We depart from much previous research on the adequacy of saving in two key ways. First, our underlying simulation model of optimal wealth accumulation allows for precautionary saving against uncertain future earnings. Second, we employ data on lifetime earnings. Using data from the 1992 Health and Retirement Study, we find that households at the median of the empirical wealth-lifetime earnings distribution are saving as much or more as the underlying model suggests is optimal, and households at the high end of the wealth distribution are saving significantly more than the model indicates. But we also find significant undersaving among the lowest 25 percent of the population. We show that reductions in Social Security benefits could have significant deleterious effects on the adequacy of saving, especially among low-income households. We also show that, controlling for lifetime earnings, households with high current earnings tend to save far more adequately than other households.

Suggested Citation

  • Eric M. Engen & William G. Gale & Cori E. Uccello, 2004. "Lifetime Earnings, Social Security Benefits, and the Adequacy of Retirement Wealth Accumulation," Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College wp2004-10, Center for Retirement Research, revised Apr 2004.
    • Handle: RePEc:crr:crrwps:wp2004-10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://crr.bc.edu/working-papers/lifetime-earnings-social-security-benefits-and-the-adequacy-of-retirement-wealth-accumulation/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Carsten Krabbe Nielsen, 2009. "Rational Overconfidence and Social Security," Discussion Paper Series 0916, Institute of Economic Research, Korea University.
    2. Fang Yang, 2005. "Accounting for the heterogeneity in retirement wealth," Working Papers 638, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    3. Grant Scobie & John Gibson & Trinh Le, 2004. "Saving for Retirement: New Evidence for New Zealand," Treasury Working Paper Series 04/12, New Zealand Treasury.
    4. Andrew Au & Olivia S. Mitchell & John W.R. Phillips, 2005. "Saving Shortfalls and Delayed Retirement," Working Papers wp094, University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center.
    5. Carsten Krabbe Nielsen, 2018. "Rational overconfidence and social security: subjective beliefs, objective welfare," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 65(2), pages 179-229, March.
    6. Karen E. Dynan & Donald L. Kohn, 2007. "The rise in U.S. household indebtedness: causes and consequences," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2007-37, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crr:crrwps:wp2004-10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Amy Grzybowski or Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/crrbcus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.