Tuesday, December 3, 2013

New publication: “Will the Rebound in Equities and Housing Save Retirement?”

The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has released a new Issue in Brief:

“Will the Rebound in Equities and Housing Save Retirement?”

By Alicia H. Munnell, Anthony Webb, and Rebecca Cannon Fraenkel

The brief’s key findings are:

  • The 2010 National Retirement Risk Index showed that 53 percent of households will not be able to maintain their standard of living in retirement.
  • But equity and house prices have both increased since then.
  • Interestingly, updating the asset values only reduces the Index to 50 percent because:
    • the rise in house prices has been relatively modest in real terms; and
    • the more robust growth in stocks mainly benefits the top third of households.

This brief is available here.

1 comment:

Patrick Sullivan said...

Alicia Munnell being the economist most responsible for the housing bubble, thanks to her early '90s Boston Fed paper claiming to have shown racial discrimination in lending. That gave rise to a raft of political activist/legislation resulting in lowered underwriting standards....

With a track record like hers....