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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Have 401(K)S Raised Household Savings? Evidence From The Health And Retirement Study, Gary V. Engelhart
Have 401(K)S Raised Household Savings? Evidence From The Health And Retirement Study, Gary V. Engelhart
Center for Policy Research
The most popular tax subsidy to household saving in the United States is the 401(k)-type pension arrangement, which subsidizes saving through income-tax deferral on wages and salary dedicated to retirement saving and through investment accrual at the pre-tax interest rate. Although enabled by legislation in 1978, 401(k) plans effectively were not adopted until the Internal Revenue Service issued clarifying rules in 1981. Since then, they have grown remarkably and become the primary vehicle for retirement saving. In 1996, 33 percent of all private pension assets, 33 percent of all pension plans, and 45 percent of all active pension participants were …
Pre-Retirement Lump-Sum Pension Distributions And Retirement Income Security: Evidence From The Health And Retirement Study, Gary V. Engelhart
Pre-Retirement Lump-Sum Pension Distributions And Retirement Income Security: Evidence From The Health And Retirement Study, Gary V. Engelhart
Center for Policy Research
This paper uses data from the 1992 and 1998 Waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine the extent of retirement wealth erosion from pre-retirement lump-sum distributions. There is little evidence that spent distributions have resulted in significant pension leakage. If spent distributions had been rolled over into a tax-qualified plan instead, they would have represented in present value between 5 and 11 percent of pension and Social Security wealth for the median household that spent a distribution. However, one-quarter of the households that spent distributions—which is 2.25 percent of all households age 51 to 61—could have increased …
The Role Of Microsimulation In Longitudinal Data Analysis, Douglas A. Wolf
The Role Of Microsimulation In Longitudinal Data Analysis, Douglas A. Wolf
Center for Policy Research
The term “microsimulation” has been linked to a range of tools and techniques that are finding growing use in empirical social science applications. This paper considers one such area, namely the potential for microsimulation to serve the needs of the data analyst, in contrast to the more common use of microsimulation by the model user. Furthermore, the focus is on longitudinal rather than cross-sectional data analysis. The paper identifies several types of longitudinal data modeling approaches in which microsimulation is particularly relevant, suggesting algorithms with which to conduct such microsimulations. Microsimulation can be used to extend the range of inferences …
United States Poverty In A Cross-National Context, Timothy Smeeding, Lee Rainwater, Gary Burtles
United States Poverty In A Cross-National Context, Timothy Smeeding, Lee Rainwater, Gary Burtles
Center for Policy Research
In this paper we use cross-national comparisons made possible by the LIS to examine America’s experience in maintaining a low poverty rate. We compare the effectiveness of United States antipoverty policies to that of similar polices elsewhere in the industrialized world. If lessons can be learned from cross-national comparisons, there is much that can be learned about antipoverty policy by American voters and policymakers. The United States has one of the highest poverty rates of all the countries participating in the LIS, whether poverty is measured using comparable absolute or relative standards for determining who is poor. Although the high …
Can Policy Changes Be Treated As Natural Experiments? Evidence From State Excise Taxes, Jeffrey D. Kubik, John R. Moran
Can Policy Changes Be Treated As Natural Experiments? Evidence From State Excise Taxes, Jeffrey D. Kubik, John R. Moran
Center for Policy Research
An important issue in public policy analysis is the potential endogeneity of the policies under study. If policy changes constitute responses on the part of political decision-makers to changes in a variable of interest, then standard analyses that treat policy changes as natural experiments may yield biased estimates of the impact of the policy (Besley and Case 2000). We examine the extent to which such political endogeneity biases conventional fixed effects estimates of behavioral parameters by identifying the elasticities of demand for cigarettes and beer using the timing of state legislative elections as an instrument for changes in state excise …