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We use two historical data sources – the Health and Retirement Study and the Medicare Current Beneficiary Study – to consider the patterns in older Americans’ severe disability and their use of long-term services and supports (LTSS) by age and socioeconomic status. We then use a dynamic microsimulation model to project how the effects of various interventions to support those with severe disabilities and their caregivers would be distributed across the income distribution. The interventions that we examine fall into three broad classes: tax credits for caregiving expenses, respite care for people in the community with family caregivers, and new social insurance programs. Within each broad class of policies, we examine how sensitive outcomes are to changes in policy details (such as, in the case of tax credits, deductible levels, refundability, and income phase-outs). This paper found that: • Older adults with less education and less wealth are more likely to report disabilities and service use than their more educated and wealthier counterparts. • This pattern persists when we look at people at a point in time but also, more robustly, when we look at their disabilities prospectively. In a sample of older adults who do not report disabilities at baseline, we find that those with fewer economic resources earlier in life are generally more likely to develop disabilities and use paid LTSS over the next two decades, but the differences narrow when we restrict the sample to people who do not develop disabilities until their late 70s. The policy implications of this paper are: • The uneven distribution of disability risks across the population poses challenges for developing effective LTSS policies. Those most likely to need LTSS often lack enough resources to contribute to LTSS programs, and programs that try to contain costs by using underwriting or imposing work requirements often disqualify those who most need coverage. • Certain classes of policies, such as respite care benefits, tend to direct much of their benefits to those in lower income quintiles, according to our projections. Caregiver tax credits and social insurance programs generally distribute benefits more proportionally, although impacts vary depending on how the policies are specified. • Policy design details can significantly affect distributional outcomes. Provisions’ effects can be sensitive to the stacking order in which they are implemented. • It can be useful to examine trends and proposals not only cross-sectionally but also over longer time periods. For example, the distributional effects of social insurance programs depend on the relatively high early-life mortality of those with less education and lower earnings and wealth.

Analysts often compile packages of Social Security changes based on publicly available projections of the effects of individual provisions. Such analyses may neglect issues of whether and how the provisions might interact to alter intended outcomes, thwarting the proposal’s financing and distributional goals. To inform policymakers about the importance of such interactions in examining the cost and distributional implications, we catalog a range of possible interactions, including some that are subtle and not well understood. Using data on U.S. workers from the Survey of Income and Program Participation matched to administrative records, we document important patterns in work and benefit histories to show how several commonly discussed Social Security proposals would affect different population groups. We then use DYNASIM, the Urban Institute’s dynamic micro-simulation model, to measure how accounting for interactions among a few of these provisions changes projections of distributional effects. The study found that: -Interactions between Social Security parameters and between Social Security and personal income taxes can be significant. -Modelers may thus wish to display incremental analyses of combinations of provisions and the both gross and net Social Security benefits in their distributional analyses. The policy implications of the findings are: -Social Security packages are best evaluated holistically. The whole does not always equal the sum of its parts, either in terms of costs or distributional effects.

Objective To forecast out-of-pocket health care spending among older adults. Long-term forecasts allow policy makers to explore potential impacts of policy scenarios, but existing microsimulations do not incorporate details of supplemental insurance coverage and income effects on health care spending. Data Sources Dynamic microsimulation calibrated to survey and administrative data. Study Design We augment Urban Institute's Dynamic Simulation of Income Model (DYNASIM) with modules that incorporate demand responses and economic equilibria, with dynamics driven by exogenous technological change. A lengthy technical appendix provides details of the microsimulation model and economic assumptions for readers interested in applying these techniques. Principal Findings The model projects total out-of-pocket spending (point of care plus premiums) as a share of income for adults aged 65 and older. People with lower incomes and poor health fare worse, despite protections of Medicaid. Spending rises 40 percent from 2012 to 2035 (from 10 to 14 percent of income) for the median beneficiary, but it increases from 5 to 25 percent of income for low-income beneficiaries and from 23 to 29 percent for the near poor who are in fair/poor health. Conclusions Despite Medicare coverage, near-poor seniors will face out-of-pocket spending that would render them, in practical terms, underinsured.

About half of older Americans will need a high level of assistance with routine activities for a prolonged period of time. This help is commonly referred to as long-term services and supports (LTSS). Under current policies, these individuals will fund roughly half of their paid care out of pocket. Partly as a result of high costs and uncertainty, relatively few people purchase private long-term care insurance or save sufficiently to fully finance LTSS; many will eventually turn to Medicaid for help. To show how policy changes could expand insurance's role in financing these needs, we modeled several new insurance options. Specifically, we looked at a front-end-only benefit that provides coverage relatively early in the period of disability but caps benefits, a back-end benefit with no lifetime limit, and a combined comprehensive benefit. We modeled mandatory and voluntary versions of each option, and subsidized and unsubsidized versions of each voluntary option. We identified important differences among the alternatives, highlighting relevant trade-offs that policy makers can consider in evaluating proposals. If the primary goal is to significantly increase insurance coverage, the mandatory options would be more successful than the voluntary versions. If the major aim is to reduce Medicaid costs, the comprehensive and back-end mandatory options would be most beneficial.

Objectives. Many single mothers are likely to face special economic challenges in old age, because they often have limited employment histories and cannot rely on husbands for financial support. This article examines the economic status of these women in later life. Methods. The analysis uses nationally representative data from the Health and Retirement Study to estimate multivariate models of income, assets. and poverty rates for women aged 65-75 in 1999. Results. Controlling for education, current marital status, and race and ethnicity, the models indicate that women who spent ≥ 10 years raising dependent children outside of marriage are 55% more likely to live in poverty at ages 65-75 than women who were always married when their children were young. Discussion. The financial difficulties confronting single mothers raising children persist into later life. Social Security reforms, especially those that are not tied to the current system of spousal and survivor benefits, could improve retirement security for these vulnerable women, whose numbers will begin to soar when the many women who raised children outside of marriage in the 1970s retire in coming years.

In recent years, the big news in Social Security reform has been the program’s fiscal concerns. In light of concerns about both program costs and benefit adequacy, we propose an effective and relatively inexpensive targeted program to provide a minimally adequate floor to old-­age income through the Social Security system. This minimum benefit plan would provide a cost-­effective method for reducing elder poverty to very low levels. A key element is that the benefit would not count toward income eligibility thresholds for other social programs. Other aspects include an income-­tested benefit that would bring beneficiaries to 100 percent of the poverty threshold; application by filing of a 1040 income tax return; and setting of benefit levels and distribution through the Social Security Administration.

Social security faces a major long-term funding crisis. A 38 or greater percentage increase in the system's tax rate is needed to meet benefit payments on an ongoing basis. Tax increases of this magnitude or comparable benefit cuts would significantly worsen social security's treatment of postwar Americans. This paper uses CORSIM (a dynamic micro simulation model) and SOCSIM (a detailed social security benefit calculator) to study this treatment. The study finds that Americans born in the postwar period will, under current law, lose roughly 5 cents of every dollar they earn to the OASI program in taxes net of benefits. Measured as a proportion of their lifetime labor incomes, the middle class are the biggest losers, surrendering about 7 cents per dollar earned. But measured in absolute dollars, the rich lose the most. Out of every dollar that postwar Americans contribute to the OASI system, 67 cents represent a pure tax. The system treats women better than men, whites better than non-whites, and the colle...

Increased labor force participation of the elderly can reduce the fiscal and economic stress from the projected aging of the population in the next century. This paper uses Survey of Income and Program Participation data matched with longitudinal earnings histories and Social Security benefit records to estimate joint work and benefit receipt choices for people age 62 and over. The probability of working is shown to depend on both worker characteristics and policy variables, with lower Social Security benefits and lower tax rates on wages both modestly increasing labor force participation of older workers.

Rapid growth in the earnings of the highest earners over the past two and a half decades has contributed to strains on Social Security’s finances and made projecting lifetime earnings on a year-by-year basis – already a complicated technical problem – even more challenging. This project uses various descriptive techniques and high-quality administrative earnings data matched to household surveys to explore related questions about the changing wage distribution. We first describe the characteristics of high earners, both at a point in time and over longer periods (from 1983 through 2010). We then evaluate how well SSA’s MINT7 dynamic microsimulation model projects inequality in the earnings distribution and the long-term characteristics of earnings paths.

As interest in proposals to restore Social Security solvency rises, it’s timely to examine whether current policy analyses provide adequate information on important distributional questions. This project explores measures of changes in Social Security benefits’ adequacy, horizontal equity, and efficiency under different proposals. We apply the measures to simulation output from the Urban Institute’s Dynamic Simulation of Income Model under the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform Social Security proposal. A series of exhibits illustrates how they work and could inform policymakers about the relative merits of varied options to restore the program’s long-run solvency and meet other objectives.

The theory that marriage has protective effects for survival has itself lived for more than 100 years since Durkheim’s groundbreaking study of suicide (Durkheim 1951 [1897]). Investigations of differences in this protective effect by gender, by age, and in contrast to different unmarried statuses, however, have yielded inconsistent conclusions. These investigations typically either use data in which marital status and other covariates are observed in cross-sectional surveys up to 10 years before mortality exposure, or use data from panel surveys with much smaller sample sizes. Their conclusions are usually not based on formal statistical tests of contrasts between men and women or between never-married, divorced/separated, and widowed statuses. Using large-scale pooled panel survey data linked to death registrations and earnings histories for U.S. men and women aged 25 and older, and with appropriate contrast tests, we find a consistent survival advantage for married over unmarried men and women, and an additional survival “premium” for married men. We find little evidence of mortality differences between never-married, divorced/separated, and widowed statuses.

Immigration is transforming the U.S. labor force with important consequences for Social Security’s adequacy and finances. Using longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation matched to rich administrative data on lifetime earnings and benefit receipt, we measure the extent to which non-natives’ lifetime earning patterns, payroll taxes paid, benefits received, and total incomes differ from those for the U.S.- born population. We consider other outcomes important to retirement security, like health status, marital status, and financial wealth. We also compare various immigrant groups with one another. Our findings stress heterogeneity in labor force and Social Security experiences among immigrants.

Recent growth in wage inequality has important implications for Social Security solvency and the distribution of benefits. Because only earnings below the taxable maximum are subject to Social Security payroll taxes, wage growth that is concentrated among very high earners will generate lower tax receipts than wage growth that is more evenly distributed. The progressivity of the Social Security benefit formula increases benefit payouts when the share of workers with low wages grows. This study uses a dynamic microsimulation model to examine the aggregate and distributional consequences of alternative scenarios about the distribution of future wage growth among workers. We find fairly marked changes in projected Social Security benefit distributions, poverty, and long-term financing status with relatively modest changes in assumptions about wage differentials.

Over the last several decades, the volatility of family income has increased markedly, and own earnings volatility has remained relatively flat. Volatility may affect retirement wealth, depending on whether volatility affects accrued pension contributions or withdrawals or earnings credited toward future Social Security benefits. This project assesses the effect of the volatility of individual and family earnings on asset accumulation and projected retirement wealth using survey data matched to administrative earnings records.

While growing fiscal pressures and increasing life expectancy have prompted calls to raise retirement ages so that lifetime benefits would be concentrated in older ages, some fear that this change—without other adjustments—might harm long-career, lower-wage workers. Tying retirement benefit eligibility to years of service might protect lower-wage workers if they tend to start their careers relatively early and work more years prior to retirement than higher-wage workers. But higher disability rates and greater employment volatility could offset lower-wage workers’ early labor force starts, and lead to fewer total years of service completed. Using survey data matched to administrative earnings records, we describe variation in work histories for current and near retirees by gender, education, and other important characteristics. We find that years of service are not likely to provide an effective way to protect the lowest-wage workers. Among other reasons, men and women with the least education also work the least.

Over the last several decades, the volatility of family income has increased markedly, and own earnings volatility has remained relatively flat. Volatility may affect retirement wealth, depending on whether volatility affects accrued pension contributions or withdrawals or earnings credited toward future Social Security benefits. This project assesses the effect of the volatility of individual and family earnings on asset accumulation and projected retirement wealth using survey data matched to administrative earnings records.

In 1998, the bipartisan National Commission on Retirement Policy advanced a reform proposal that contained a minimum benefit within Social Security. Since then, numerous congressional proposals have included minimum benefits as part of a package of reforms, and a commission President George W. Bush set up during his first term also recommended one. Little effort, however, has been made to develop the rationale for a minimum benefit or to examine alternative designs.1 As a consequence, the design of a minimum benefit — or, for that matter, of almost all redistributive formulas within Social Security — has seldom been based on any theoretical or empirical notion of exactly what goals are sought and what types of formulaic adjustments would best achieve them.

This report describes the work the Urban Institute performed to generate the Model of Income in the Near Term, Version 5 (MINT5). MINT is a tool developed for The Division of Policy Evaluation (DPE) of the Social Security Administration (SSA) to analyze the distributional consequences of Social Security reform proposals. MINT is a micro-level data file of individuals born between 1926 and 2018. It starts with a rich set of income and demographic characteristics from the 1990 to 1996 Survey of Income and Program Particpation (SIPP) data linked to SSA data on earnings and benefits. MINT then projects these characteristics until death or the year 2099.

Our project uses DYNASIM3, the Urban Institute's dynamic microsimulation model of the U.S. population, to simulate several alternative systems of Social Security auxiliary benefits. We specifically consider earnings sharing, a system in which a husband's and a wife's earnings records are combined and averaged over the duration of their marriage when computing Social Security benefits. We also consider whether other changes to Social Security's benefit computations - like caregiver credits, minimum benefits, and more modest changes to spouse/survivor benefits - could improve program adequacy and horizontal equity with less complexity and fewer transition difficulties relative to earnings sharing. Each proposal we examine substitutes existing spouse (and, sometimes, all or parts of survivor) benefits with mechanisms that explicitly acknowledge marital partnerships, are more neutral with respect to marriage, and/or better target economically vulnerable people. All proposals are roughly cost-equivalent in 2050. We find that all three packages - earnings sharing, replacement of most of the spouse benefit with a minimum, and full spouse replacement with caregiver credits - reduced poverty modestly and made lifetime benefits more similar for couples paying the same amount in taxes relative to current law scheduled. The earnings-sharing proposal, however, only achieved the poverty reduction with significant adjustments to the treatment of surviving spouses through a self-financed survivor benefit. The packages reveal important tradeoffs among beneficiary groups, with particular tensions between workers and non-workers, and married, never married, divorced, and widowed persons.

In this study we project the long-term effects of a proposal that carves out some Social Security contributions to pay for personal accounts. We compare the distributional outcomes to the current system and examine how different strategies for annuitizing personal account balances might change these outcomes. We find that personal accounts would reduce some of the redistribution in the current system by tying benefits more closely to work histories. However, annuitization of balances and options such as joint and survivor protection, period certain payouts, and cash refunds also would affect the distributional outcomes.

Unlike most analyses of Social Security reforms, this paper explicitly considers interactions with the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. Using a microsimulation model, we examine reducing Social Security benefits by the percentage required to approach 75-year solvency. We then add options for attenuating the effects on low-income beneficiaries. In the simulated reforms, we compare benefit receipt patterns, poverty rates, and winners and losers in 2022. Substantial reforms are necessary for SSI to play a more effective income security role. Among the limited set of reforms we consider, Social Security minimum benefit plans would more effectively reduce poverty among low-income beneficiaries.

This project uses dynamic microanalytic simulation techniques to explore the distributional consequences of Plan 2 of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. This plan includes a voluntary personal account that would be carved out of currently-scheduled benefit contributions, a new minimum benefit, and an increase in widow(er)s benefits. It also shifts the current wage-indexed initial benefit formula to a price-indexed formula to address most of the current system's long-term solvency problem. The analysis begins by adopting the assumptions of the Office of the Chief Actuary (OCACT) regarding portfolio allocation, rates of return, administrative costs, and mandatory annuitization of personal account balances to develop a baseline of Model 2. We compare the distributional results with current-law promised benefits and a current-law scenario adjusted to match the revenues we estimate are required to fund the OCACT baseline in 2050 exclusive of the private account provisions. Subsequently, we test the sensitivity of our baseline estimates to different assumptions about participation in personal accounts, investment patterns, administrative costs, variation in market returns across the life cycle, and rates of return on investments. To simulate likely participation patterns in voluntary private accounts and participants' portfolio allocation choices, we estimate models using recent data from the Survey of Consumer Finances. The results from our core and sensitivity analyses bracket the likely outcomes of the reform plan and demonstrate how this type of reform might affect subgroups of the future elderly population.

In examining a number of important research questions related to the reform of the Social Security program, it is helpful to understand patterns of participation in the Disability Insurance (DI) program. DI beneficiaries comprise a large fraction, approximately 15 percent, of the pool of workers who receive Social Security benefits (Social Security Administration, 2001: Table 5.A16). They are a particularly vulnerable group in later life, with poverty rates more than twice as high as those for recipients of retirement or survivor benefits from Social Security (Thompson and Smith, 2002: Table A9-13c). Those who receive DI also have very different mortality experiences than those who do not (Zayatz, 1999), so careful modeling of the overlap between mortality and disability is essential when trying to determine the lifetime distributional consequences of Social Security reform. In addition, the larger disabled population, consisting of those who report work limitations but do not necessarily receive DI benefits, is also at higher risk of poverty and death than those who do not report work limitations. This research note explores these important intersections by presenting estimates from multivariate analyses of self-reported disability status, observed mortality, and reports of DI participation from administrative data. In our analyses, we use data from the 1990 through 1993 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) matched to the Social Security Administration's Summary Earnings Records (SER), Master Beneficiary Records (MBR), and Death Master File (from the Social Security number identification file, or Numident). Using administrative data allows us to improve upon several previous studies, as research consistently demonstrates that self-reports of earnings and disability benefit receipt are unreliable. Individuals often round up or down when reporting their earnings, particularly if they are asked about the distant past, and they frequently misreport social insurance and social assistance benefit types because they misunderstand the reasons that they receive benefits (see, for example, Huynh, Rupp, and Sears, 2002).

Employment rates for single mothers with dependent children have been rising, partly because of welfare reform and expansions in the Earned Income Tax Credit. This paper examines this trend and implications for future retirement security. The results show that employment and earnings gains for single mothers during the late 1990s will translate into modestly higher Social Security benefits and better retirement outcomes when they reach later life, assuming these trends persist. However, most single mothers will fare worse in retirement than other women, primarily because they generally earned low wages over their lifetimes and many lack financial support from spouses.

Husbands and wives often coordinate retirement decisions, as many married workers withdraw from the labor force at about the same time as their spouses. However, joint retirement behavior may differ for couples in which one spouse retires with health problems. In those cases, the able-bodied spouse may delay retirement to compensate for the earnings lost by the disabled spouse. This paper examines the retirement decisions of husbands and wives and how they interact with spousal health and employment, using data from the 1992-1998 waves of the Health and Retirement Study. The results indicate that both men and women are more likely to retire if their spouses have already retired than if they are still working. However, they are less likely to retire if their spouses appear to have left the labor force because of health problems, especially when spouses are not yet eligible for Social Security retirement benefits. There is no evidence that spousal caregiving demands affect retirement rates.

Using the Dynamic Simulation of Income Model, we project how Social Security benefits and payroll taxes would change were Congress to enact the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform's proposal. We show benefits at several points in time and relative to pre-retirement income, a low-income standard, and lifetime payroll tax contributions. The proposal's projected effects are particularly deep relative to current law scheduled for those reaching retirement in several decades. Projected benefit reductions relate closely to lifetime earnings: Lower earners are largely shielded, higher earners face significant reductions. Projections are sensitive to workers' assumed responses to certain proposal provisions.