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Under standard assumptions, both individuals and the government are indifferent between traditional tax-deferred retirement accounts and “front-loaded” (Roth) accounts. When we add investment fees to this benchmark, individuals are still indifferent but the government is not. We estimate that tax deferral increases demand for asset management services by $3 trillion, causing the government to pay $20.7 billion in corresponding annual fees. In a general equilibrium model with asset management services as differentiated products, we examine the incidence and welfare implications of the added demand. Tax deferral in our model produces a larger asset management industry, higher taxes, and lower social welfare.

Companies that freeze defined benefit pension plans save the equivalent of 13.5% of the long-horizon payroll of current employees. Furthermore, firms with higher prospective accruals are more likely to freeze their plans. Cost savings would not be possible in a benchmark model in which i) all workers receive compensation equal to their marginal product and ii) workers value equally all identical-cost forms of pension benefits. We find evidence consistent both with firms' reneging on implicit contracts that would have provided workers with high pension accruals later in their careers and with shifts in employee valuation of different forms of retirement benefits.

We conduct and analyze two large surveys of hypothetical annuitization choices. We find that allowing individuals to annuitize a fraction of their wealth increases annuitization relative to a situation where annuitization is an “all or nothing†decision. Very few respondents choose declining real payout streams over flat or increasing real payout streams of equivalent expected present value. Highlighting the effects of inflation increases demand for cost of living adjustments. Frames that highlight flexibility, control, and investment significantly reduce annuitization. A majority of respondents prefer to receive an extra “bonus†payment during one month of the year that is funded by slightly lower payments in the remaining months. Concerns about later-life income, spending flexibility, and counterparty risk are the most important self-reported motives that influence the annuitization decision.

How public pension plan assets should be invested is an important but unsettled question. Alicia H. Munnell and Mauricio Soto (2007) find that the share of state and local (S&L) plan assets held in equities has grown over time, largely in parallel with private sector practices, from an average of about 40 percent in the late 1980s to about 70 percent in 2007. This exposure led to a loss of an estimated $1 trillion dollars following the decline of the stock market from October 2007 to October 2008 (Munnell, Kelly Haverstick, and Jean-Pierre Aubry 2008). Nevertheless, some observers endorse the standard practice of investing heavily in higher yielding but riskier equities, reasoning that the higher average returns will reduce future required tax receipts and also help to reduce underfunding over time. Others advocate a more conservative approach that reduces the volatility of funding levels and the likelihood of severe shortfalls during economic downturns when government resources are already constrained (e.g., Lawrence N. Bader and Jeremy Gold 2007). The accounting rules for public pensions create a perverse incentive to invest in stocks: since projected liabilities are discounted at the expected return on assets rather than at a rate that reflects the generally lower risk of liabilities, investing the assets in the stock market leads to

As the workhorse of consumption and saving research for the past four decades, the life-cycle model has proved flexible and useful for examining a variety of questions. In a classic paper, Albert Ando and Franco Modigliani (1963 p. 56) stated a key assumption of the basic model: “[t]he individual neither expects to receive nor desires to leave any inheritance.” Although the authors contended that the absence of a bequest motive was not critical to the heart of their results, the assumption set off a long-standing battle over the relative importance of different motives for saving. In an influential study, Laurence Kotlikoff and Laurence Summers (1981) estimated that a large fraction of the U.S. capital stock was attributable to intergenerational transfers. Modigliani and his collaborators vigorously disagreed and, based on their own empirical work, claimed that life-cycle saving was the primary source of capital accumulation (Modigliani, 1988). Subsequent work has failed to reach a consensus. Since this debate began, an important advance in the consumption literature has been the incorporation of uncertainty in life-cycle models (see e.g., R. Glenn Hubbard et al., 1995). We argue that allowing for uncertainty resolves the controversy over the importance of life-cycle and bequest saving by showing that these motives for saving are overlapping and cannot generally be distinguished. A dollar saved today simultaneously serves both a precautionary life-cycle function (guarding against future contingencies such as health shocks or other emergencies) and a bequest function because, in the likely event that the dollar is not absorbed by these contingencies, it will be available to bequeath to children or other worthy causes. Under this view, households have a bequest motive, but bequests are given (i.e., the motive is “operative”) in only some states of the world. Wealth is something like traveler’s checks: you take them along on vacation “just in case,” but odds are they will remain uncashed and available for sundry goods after the journey is complete. We first demonstrate the result using a simple model and then argue that this approach reconciles the apparent importance of bequests with households’ declared focus on life-cycle saving. Finally, we consider implications of our analysis.

The issue of whether higher lifetime income households save a larger fraction of their income is an important factor in the evaluation of tax and macroeconomic policy. Despite an outpouring of research on this topic in the 1950s and 1960s, the question remains unresolved and has since received little attention. This paper revisits the issue, using new empirical methods and the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, the Survey of Consumer Finances, and the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We first consider the various ways in which life cycle models can be altered to generate differences in saving rates by income groups: differences in Social Security benefits, different time preference rates, non-homothetic preferences, bequest motives, uncertainty, and consumption floors. Using a variety of instruments for lifetime income, we find a strong positive relationship between personal saving rates and lifetime income. The data do not support theories relying on time preference rates, non-homothetic preferences, or variations in Social Security benefits. Instead, the evidence is consistent with models in which precautionary saving and bequest motives drive variations in saving rates across income groups. Finally, we illustrate how models that assume a constant rate of saving across income groups can yield erroneous predictions.

This paper identifies the key economic issues that must be addressed in the debate over a privatized social security system. We examine a two-pillar plan. The first pillar would consist of a demogrant: a small indexed pension of the same dollar amount for all retirees who had contributed to the system over a full lifetime of work. The second pillar would consist of a fully-funded individual defined-contribution account, financed by payroll taxes, held in financial institutions, and directed by participants. We explore how such a system would affect the risks households face, how it would alter the distribution of income, and how it might influence household behavior, including incentives to work and save, and portfolio choices. We also examine macroeconomic issues: how the transition to a private plan would occur, and what the likely effects would be on national saving. We conclude that a two-pillar system offers several positive features, namely a reduction in political risk, an increase in household portfolio choice, and improved work incentives. Disadvantages include less redistributiveness and national risk sharing, and increased administrative costs.

This paper examines predictions of a life-cycle simulation model — in which individuals face uncertainty regarding thier length of life, earnings, and out-of- pocket medical expenditures, and imperfect insurance and lending markets — for

In the standard analysis of overlapping generations economies with gifts from children to parents, each generation takes the actions of other generations as given. The resulting equilibrium is dynamically inefficient. In reality, however, parents realize that children will respond to higher parental saving by reducing gifts. For a broad class of gift economies, this implicit tax on saving pushes the equilibrium to dynamic efficiency. This result reestablishes the potential relevance of the gift model to the US economy, renders moot an important part of the Ricardian equivalence debate, and provides a motivation for a type of social security system.

One measure of the health of the Social Security system is the difference between the market value of the trust fund and the present value of benefits accrued to date. How should present values be computed for this calculation in light of future uncertainties? We think it is important to use market value. Since claims on accrued benefits are not currently traded in financial markets, we cannot directly observe a market value. In this paper, we use a model to estimate what the market price for these claims would be if they were traded. In valuing such claims, the key issue is properly adjusting for risk. The traditional actuarial approach -- the approach currently used by the Social Security Administration in generating its most widely cited numbers -- ignores risk and instead simply discounts "expected" future flows back to the present using a risk-free rate. If benefits are risky and this risk is priced by the market, then actuarial estimates will differ from market value. Effectively, market valuation uses a discount rate that incorporates a risk premium. Developing the proper adjustment for risk requires a careful examination of the stream of future benefits. The U.S. Social Security system is "wage-indexed": future benefits depend directly on future realizations of the economy-wide average wage index. We assume that there is a positive long-run correlation between average labor earnings and the stock market. We then use derivative pricing methods standard in the finance literature to compute the market price of individual claims on future benefits, which depend on age and macro state variables. Finally, we aggregate the market value of benefits across all cohorts to arrive at an overall value of accrued benefits. We find that the difference between market valuation and "actuarial" valuation is large, especially when valuing the benefits of younger cohorts. Overall, the market value of accrued benefits is only 4/5 of that implied by the actuarial approach. Ignoring cohorts over age 60 (for whom the valuations are the same), market value is only 70% as large as that implied by the actuarial approach.

Only one-fourth of U.S. families own stock. This paper examines whether the consumption of stockholders differs from the consumption of nonstockholders and, if so, whether these differences help explain the empirical failures of the consumption-based CAPM. Household panel data are used to construct time series on the consumption of each group. The results indicate that the consumption of stockholders is more volatile and more highly correlated with the excess return on the stock market. These differences help explain the size of the equity premium, although they do not fully resolve the equity premium puzzle.

The heated debate about how to reform Social Security has come to a standstill because the view of most Democrats (that Social Security must be a defined benefits plan similar in spirit to the current system) seems irreconcilable with the proposals supported by many Republicans (to create a defined contribution system of personal accounts holding marketed assets).We describe a system of "progressive personal accounts" that preserves the core goals of both parties, and that is self-balancing on an ongoing basis. Progressive personal accounts have two critical features: (1) accruals into the personal accounts would be exclusively in a new kind of derivative security (which we call a PAAW for Personal Annuitized Average Wage security) that pays its owner one inflation-corrected dollar during every year of life after his statutory retirement date, multiplied by the economy wide average wage at the retirement date and (2) households would buy their new PAAWs each year with their social security contributions, augmented or reduced by a government match that would add to contributions from households with low lifetime incomes by taking from households with high lifetime incomes. PAAWS define benefits and achieve risk sharing across generations, as Democrats would like, yet can be held in personal accounts with market valuations, as Republicans propose.

Many advocates of social security privatization argue that rates of return under a defined contribution individual account system would be much higher for all than they are under the current social security system. This claim is false. The mistake comes from ignoring accrued benefits already promised based on past payroll taxes and from underestimating the riskiness of stock investments. Confusion arises because three distinct reforms are muddled. By privatization we mean creating individual accounts (which could, for example, be invested exclusively in bonds). By diversification we mean investing in stocks, and perhaps other assets, as well as bonds; diversification might be undertaken either by individuals in their private social security accounts or by the social security trust fund. By prefunding we mean closing the gap between social security benefits promised to date and the assets on hand to pay for them. Any one of these reforms could be implemented without the other two. If the system were completely privatized, with no prefunding or diversification, the social security system would need to raise taxes and/or issue new debt in order to pay benefits already accrued. If the burden were spread evenly across all future generations via a constant proportional tax, the added taxes would completely eliminate any rate of return advantage on the individual accounts. We estimate that the required new taxes would amount to about 3 percent of payroll, or about a quarter of all social security contributions, in perpetuity. Unlike privatization, prefunding would raise rates of return for later generations, but at the cost of lower returns for today's workers. For households able to invest in the stock market on their own, diversification would not raise rates of return, correctly adjusted to recognize risk. Households that are constrained from holding stock, due to lack of wealth outside of social security or to fixed costs from holding stocks, would gain higher risk-adjusted returns and would benefit from diversification. If this group is large, diversification would raise stock values, thus helping current stockholders, but it would lower future stock returns, thus hurting young unconstrained households. Overall, since the number of truly constrained households is probably not that large, privatization and diversification would have a much smaller effect on returns than reformers typically claim.

This paper describes how three money's worth measures the benefit-to-tax ratio, the internal rate of return, and the net present value are calculated and used in analyses of social security reforms, including systems with privately managed individual accounts invested in equities. Declining returns from the U.S. social security system prove to be the inevitable result of having instituted an unfunded (pay-as-you-go) retirement system that delivered $7.9 trillion of net transfers (in 1997 present value dollars) to people born before 1917, and will deliver another $1.8 trillion to people born between 1918 and 1937. But young and future workers cannot necessarily do better by investing their payroll taxes in capital markets. If the old system were closed down, massive unfunded liabilities of $9-10 trillion would still have to be paid unless already accrued benefits were cut. Alternative methods of calculating these accrued benefits yield somewhat different numbers: the straight line calculation is $800 billion less than the constant benefit calculation we propose as the benchmark. Using this benchmark in a world with no uncertainty, we show that privatization without prefunding would not increase returns at all, net of the new taxes needed to pay for unfunded liabilities. These new taxes would amount to 3.6 percent of payroll, or about 29 percent of social security contributions. Prefunding, implemented by reducing accrued benefits or by raising taxes, would eventually increase money's worth for later generations, but at the cost of lower money's worth for today's workers and/or retirees. Computing money's worth when there is uncertainty is much more difficult unless four conditions hold prices into stocks and out of bonds has no effect whatsoever on money's worth when it i adjusted for risk: a dollar of stock is worth no more than a dollar of bonds. diversification can raise welfare for constrained households, but the exact money's worth must depend on specific assumptions about household attitudes toward risk. Calculations lik the Social Security Advisory Council that attribute over $2.85 of net present va $1 shifted from bonds to stocks completely overlook the disutility of risk. By estimate that a 2 percent of payroll equity fund carved out of social security w present value by about 59 cents per dollar of bonds switched into equities When the likely reductions in income and longevity insurance are factored in privatization and diversification is substantially less than popularly perceived

Many advocates of social security privatization argue that rates of return under a defined contribution individual account system would be much higher for all than they are under the current social security system. This claim is false. The mistake comes from ignoring accrued benefits already promised based on past payroll taxes, and from underestimating the riskiness of stock investments. Confusion arises because three distinct reforms are muddled. By privatization we mean creating individual accounts (which could, for example, be invested exclusively in bonds). By diversification we mean investing in stocks, and perhaps other assets, as well as bonds; diversification might be undertaken either by individuals in their private social security accounts, or by the social security trust fund. By prefunding we mean closing the gap between social security benefits promised to date and the assets on hand to pay for them. Any one of these reforms could be implemented without the other two. If the system were completely privatized, with no prefunding or diversification, the social security system would need to raise taxes and/or issue new debt in order to pay benefits already accrued. If the burden were spread evenly across all future generations via a constant proportional tax, the added taxes would completely eliminate any rate of return advantage on the individual accounts. We estimate that the required new taxes would amount to about 3 percent of payroll, or about a quarter of all social security contributions, in perpetuity. Unlike privatization, prefunding would raise rates of return for later generations, but at the cost of lower returns for today's workers. For households able to invest in the stock market on their own, diversification would not raise rates of return, correctly adjusted to recognize risk. Households that are constrained from holding stock, due to lack of wealth outside of social security or to fixed costs from holding stocks, would gain higher risk-adjusted returns and would benefit from diversification. If this group is large, diversification would raise stock values, thus helping current stockholders, but it would lower future stock returns, thus hurting young unconstrained households. Overall, since the number of truly constrained households is probably not that large, privatization and diversification would have a much smaller effect on returns than reformers typically claim.

This paper describes how three money's worth measures -- the benefit-to-tax ratio, the internal rate of return, and the net present value -- are calculated and used in analyses of social security reforms, including systems with privately managed individual accounts invested in equities. Declining returns from the U.S. social security system prove to be the inevitable result of having instituted an unfunded (pay-as-you-go) retirement system that delivered $7.9 trillion of net transfers (in 1997 present value dollars) to people born before 1917, and will deliver another $1.8 trillion to people born between 1918 and 1937. But young and future workers cannot necessarily do better by investing their payroll taxes in capital markets. If the old system were closed down, massive unfunded liabilities of $9-10 trillion would still have to be paid unless already accrued benefits were cut. Alternative methods of calculating these accrued benefits yield somewhat different numbers: the straight line calculation is $800 billion less than the constant benefit calculation we propose as the benchmark. Using this benchmark in a world with no uncertainty, we show that privatization without prefunding would not increase returns at all, net of the new taxes needed to pay for unfunded liabilities. These new taxes would amount to 3.6 percent of payroll, or about 29 percent of social security contributions. Prefunding implemented by reducing accrued benefits or by raising taxes, would eventually increase money's worth for later generations, but at the cost of lower money's worth for today's workers and/or retirees. Computing money's worth when there is uncertainty is much more difficult unless four conditions hold, namely optimization, time homogeneity, stable prices, and spanning. Under these conditions, the diversification of social security investments into stocks and out of bonds has no effect whatsoever on money's worth when it is properly adjusted for risk: a dollar of stock is worth no more than a dollar of bonds. When spanning fails, diversification can raise welfare for constrained households, but the exact money's worth must depend on specific assumptions about household attitudes toward risk. Calculations like those of the Social Security Advisory Council that attribute over $2.85 of net present value gain to each $1 shifted from bonds to stocks completely overlook the disutility of risk. By contrast, we estimate that a 2 percent of payroll equity fund carved out of social security would increase net present value by about 59 cents per dollar of bonds switched into equities, instead of $2.85. When the likely reductions in income and longevity insurance are factored in, the net advantage of privatization and diversification is substantially less than popularly perceived.

Micro data studies of household saving often find a significant group in the population with virtually no wealth, raising concerns about heterogeneity in motives for saving. In particular, this heterogeneity has been interpreted as evidence against the life cycle model of saving. This paper argues that a life cycle model can replicate observed patterns in household wealth accumulation after accounting explicitly for precautionary saving and asset-based, means-tested social insurance. We demonstrate theoretically that social insurance programs with means tests based on assets discourage saving by households with low expected lifetime income. In addition, we evaluate the model using a dynamic programming model with four state variables. Assuming common preference parameters across lifetime income groups, we are able to replicate the empirical pattern that low-income households are more likely than high-income households to hold virtually no wealth. Low wealth accumulation can be explained as a utility-maxim...

This paper examines predictions of a life-cycle simulation model -- in which individuals face uncertainty regarding their length of life, earnings, and out-of-pocket medical expenditures, and imperfect insurance and lending markets -- for individual and aggregate wealth accumulation. Relative to life-cycle or buffer-stock alternatives, our augmented life-cycle model better matches a variety of features of U.S. data, including: (1) aggregate wealth, (2) cross-sectional differences in wealth-age and consumption-age profiles by education group, and (3) short-run time-series co-movements of consumption and income.

Only one-fourth of U.S. families own stock. This paper examines whether the consumption of stockholders differs from the consumption of non-stockholders and whether these differences help explain the empirical failures of the consumption-based CAPM. Household panel data are used to construct time series on the consumption of each group. The results indicate that the consumption of stockholders is more volatile than that of non-stockholders and is more highly correlated with the excess return on the stock market. These differences help explain the size of the equity premium, although they do not fully resolve the equity premium puzzle.

Several recent studies have suggested that empirical rejections of the permanent income/life cycle model may be due to the existence of liquidity constraints. This paper tests the permanent income hypothesis against the alternative hypothesis that consumers optimize subject to a well-specified sequence of borrowing constraints. Implications for consumption in the presence of borrowing constraints are derived and then tested using time-series/cross-section data on families from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The results generally support the hypothesis that an inability to borrow against future labor income affects the consumption of a significant portion of the population. Copyright 1989 by University of Chicago Press.

This paper examines Ricardian equivalence in a world in which taxes arenot lump sum, but are levied on risky labor income. It shows that themarginal propensity to consume out of a tax cut, coupled with a futureincome tax increase, can be substantial under plausible assumptions. Indeed, the MPC out of a tax cut can be closer to the Keynesian valuethat ignores the future tax liabilities than to the Ricardian value that treats future taxes as if they were lump sum. Copyright 1986 by American Economic Association.

We examine two measures of monthly manufacturing production. The first is the index of industrial production; the second is constructed from the accounting identity that output equals sales plus the change in inventories. We show that the means, variances, and serial correlation coefficients of the log growth races differ substantially between the two series, and the cross-correlations between the two seasonally adjusted series are in most cases less than .4. A model of classical measurement error indicates chat in 15 of 20 2-digit industries measurement error accounts for over 35% of the variation in the monthly growth rates of seasonally adjusted industrial production.

A great deal of research on the empirical behavior of inventories examines some variant of the production smoothing model of finished goods inventories. The overall assessment of this model that exists in the literature is quite negative: there is little evidence that manufacturers hold inventories of finished goods in order to smooth production patterns.

When can a government run a rational Ponzi game, i.e., issue debt and never pay back any interest or principal? The transversalit y condition of each individual implies that such schemes require an i nfinity of lenders. Given this, horizons are unimportant: Ponzi games cannot be ruled out by assuming that agents have infinite horizons. The authors point out both the basic similarity of, and some key diff erences between, rational Ponzi games and asset price bubbles or fiat money. Regarding international debt, the analysis implies that what matters for the feasibility of rational Ponzi games are conditions in the lenders', not the borrowers', economy. Copyright 1988 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

No one has derived closed-form solutions for consumption with stochastic labor income and constant relative risk aversion utility. A numerical technique is used here to give an accurate approximation to the solution. The resulting consumption function is often dramatically different than the certainty equivalence solution typically used, in which consumption is proportional to the sum of financial wealth and the present value of expected future income. The results help explain three important empirical consumption puzzles: excess sensitivity of consumption to transitory income, high growth of consumption in the presence of a low risk-free interest rate, and underspending of the elderly.