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Working Paper
The adequacy of life insurance: evidence from the health and retirement survey
This study examines life insurance adequacy among married American couples approaching retirement based on the 1992 Health and Retirement Survey with matched Social Security earnings histories. It evaluates each household's life insurance needs based on new financial planning software that embodies a life-cycle-planning model and covers a broad array of demographic, economic, and financial characteristics. A sizable minority of households are significantly underinsured. Almost one third of wives and over 10 percent of husbands would have suffered living-standard reductions greater than 20 ...
Journal Article
The 1995 budget and health care reform: a generational perspective
A presentation of the baseline generational accounts for 1992, estimating both the effect of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 and the further impact of the Clinton administration's health reform proposal.
Working Paper
Social security and Medicare policy from the perspective of generational accounting
An application of the generational accounting method of fiscal policy analysis to projected spending paths for Social Security and Medicare suggesting that, under realistic assumptions for these programs, future generations as well as current young Americans could bear a significantly larger share of the burden of government spending than previously thought.
Working Paper
The mismatch between life insurance holdings and financial vulnerabilities: evidence from the Health and Retirement Survey
Using data on older workers from the 1992 Health and Retirement Survey, along with an elaborate life-cycle planning model, the authors quantify the effect of each individual's death on the financial status of his or her survivors and the degree to which life insurance holdings moderate these consequences. The average change in living standard that would result from a spouse's death is small, both in absolute terms and relative to the decline that would occur without insurance. However, this average obscures a startling mismatch between insurance holdings and underlying vulnerabilities. For ...
Working Paper
Life-cycle saving, limits on contributions to DC pension plans, and lifetime tax benefits
This paper analyzes questions related to defined contribution (DC) plans. For what types of households are statutory contribution limits likely to bind? How large is the lifetime tax benefit from participating in a DC plan and how does it vary with lifetime income? The authors find that contribution limits bind for households that begin their plan participation late in life or wish to retire early, single-earner households, those who are not borrowing-constrained, those with rapid rates of real wage growth, and those with high levels of earnings regardless of age. Setting contribution rates ...
Working Paper
Did the 2017 Tax Reform Discriminate against Blue State Voters?
The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) made significant changes to corporate and personal federal income taxation, including limiting the SALT (state and local property, income and sales taxes) deductibility to $10,000. States with high SALT tend to vote Democratic. This paper estimates the differential effect of the TCJA on red- and blue-state taxpayers and investigates the importance of the SALT limitation to this differential. We calculate the effect of permanent implementation of the TCJA on households using The Fiscal Analyzer: a life-cycle, consumption-smoothing program incorporating ...
Journal Article
Generational accounts and lifetime tax rates, 1900-1991
An update of the baseline generational accounts reported in the 1993 federal budget that extends the analysis to lifetime net tax rates--the taxes that a generation pays, less the Social Security and other transfer benefits that it receives, as a share of income over its entire lifetime.
Working Paper
The annuitization of Americans' resources: a cohort analysis
An analysis of the changes since 1960 in the share of Americans' resources that are annuitized, which has declined slightly for younger Americans but has risen dramatically for the elderly, with important implications for the national saving rate and income inequality.
Working Paper
Understanding the postwar decline in United States saving: a cohort analysis
An analysis of the postwar decline in U.S. national saving that decomposes changes in the net national saving rate into those due to changes in cohort-specific consumption propensities, the intergenerational distribution of resources, the rate of government spending, and demographics. ; A review and expansion of Calomiris, Kahn, and Longhofer's (1994) cultural affinity theory of discrimination in the residential mortgage market, which is based on the idea that lenders find it easier or less costly to evaluate the creditworthiness of applicants with whom they have a common experiential ...