Upcoming event: “35 Years After the Greenspan Commission, Is It Time for a New Social Security Commission?”

35 Years After the Greenspan Commission, Is It Time for a New Social Security Commission?

35 years ago, President Ronald Reagan appointed the National Commission on Social Security Reform, whose recommendations set the stage for bipartisan legislation to extend the life of the Social Security program by 50 years. With Social Security’s trust fund on a rapid path toward insolvency, is it time for another bipartisan commission to shore up its finances?

Join us on as we gather lawmakers and Social Security experts to discuss the Social Security programs past, as well as its future.

Date and time: Wednesday, December 7, 9:15 am - 10:30 am. Breakfast will be served at 9:00 am.

Location: Room HVC - 201AB, United States Capitol Building, Washington D.C. 20004. This is on the House Side of the Capitol Building so please use the South entrance.

Keynote:

• Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK)
• Congressman John Delaney (D-MD)*

Panel Participants Include:

• Dr. Edward Berkowitz, Professor of History and Public Policy and Public Administration, George Washington University
• Jim Kessler, Senior Vice-President for Policy, Thirdway
• Dr. Sylvester Schieber, former Chairman, Social Security Advisory Board
• Maya MacGuineas, President, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
• Moderator: Scott Horsley, White House Correspondent, NPR

*Invited Speaker

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Presentation: "Comparing CBO’s Long-Term Projections With Those of the Social Security Trustees"

This can be a bit wonky, but given the large differences between the CBO and Social Security Trustees' projections for the program's finances, it's worth taking a look. One thing that strikes me is that, while most of the gap can be explained through differences in economics and demographic assumptions, there's still a significant difference even after differing assumptions are accounted for. That residual presumably comes down to either more deeply embedded assumptions that CBO didn't analyze or differences in how the two teams put their models together.

Comparing CBO’s Long-Term Projections With Those of the Social Security Trustees

Presentation by Julie Topoleski, Chief of the Long-Term Analysis Unit in CBO’s Health, Retirement, and Long-Term Analysis Division, to the Social Security Advisory Board.

November 18, 2016

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Savings & Retirement Foundation: "How Same Sex Marriage Affect Retirement Income and Government Budgets"

Please join us for a meeting of the Savings and Retirement Foundation with guest speakers Stephen Rose And Karen E. Smith on "How Same Sex Marriage Affect Retirement Income and Government Budgets" They will discuss their new paper on using DYNASIM to estimate the impact of legal same-sex marriage on retirement income and government budgets. Tuesday, November 15, 2016 Noon-1:00 p.m. RSVP Location:   Tax Foundation 1350 G Street #950 Washington D.C. (Lunch will be provided) Dr. Stephen J. Rose is a Research Professor at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy and a nationally-recognized labor economist who has been doing innovative research and writing about the interactions between formal education, training, career movements, incomes, and earnings for the last 35 years.  Karen Smith is a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she is an internationally recognized expert in microsimulation. Over the past 30 years, she has developed microsimulation models for evaluating Social Security, pensions, taxation, wealth and savings, labor supply, charitable giving, health expenditure, student aid, and welfare reform.   Stephen Rose Research Professor GW Institute of Public Policy Karen Smith Senior Fellow, Urban Institute

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New paper: “The Affordable Care Act as Retiree Health Insurance: Implications for Retirement and Social Security Claiming”

The Affordable Care Act as Retiree Health Insurance: Implications for Retirement and Social Security Claiming

by Alan L. Gustman, Thomas L. Steinmeier, Nahid Tabatabai - #22815 (AG HE LS PE)

Abstract:

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on retirement. We first calculate retirements (and in related analyses changes in expected ages of retirement and/or Social Security claiming) between 2010, before ACA, and 2014, after ACA, for those with health insurance at work but not in retirement. This group experienced the sharpest change in retirement incentives from ACA. We then compare retirement measures for those with health insurance at work but not in retirement with retirement measures for two other groups, those who, before ACA, had employer provided health insurance both at work and in retirement, and those who had no health insurance either at work or in retirement. To complete a difference-in-difference analysis, we make the same calculations for members of an older cohort over the same age span. We find no evidence that ACA increases the propensity to retire or changes the retirement expectations of those who, before ACA, had coverage when working but not when retired.

An analysis based on a structural retirement model suggests that eventually ACA will increase the probability of retirement by those who initially had health insurance on the job but did not have employer provided retiree health insurance. But the retirement increase is quite small, only about half a percentage point at each year of age. The model also suggests that much of the effect of ACA on retirement will be realized within a few years of the change in the law.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w22815?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw

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New working papers from the Center for Retirement Research.

The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has recently released eight working papers:

The Mortality Effects of Retirement: Evidence from Social Security Eligibility at Age 62

Maria D. Fitzpatrick and Timothy J. Moore

The Labor Supply of Disabled Veterans: 1995-2014

Matthew S. Rutledge, Geoffrey T. Sanzenbacher, and Caroline V. Crawford

How Does Student Debt Affect Early-Career Retirement Saving?

Matthew S. Rutledge, Geoffrey T. Sanzenbacher, and Francis M. Vitagliano

What Are the Effects of Doubling Up on Retirement Income and Assets?

Deirdre Pfeiffer, Katrin B. Anacker, and Brooks Louton

An Overview of the Pension/OPEB Landscape

Alicia H. Munnell and Jean-Pierre Aubry

Cognitive Impairment and Social Security’s Representative Payee Program

Anek Belbase and Geoffrey T. Sanzenbacher

Do Late-Career Wages Boost Social Security More for Women than Men?

Matthew S. Rutledge and John E. Lindner

Calculating Expected Social Security Benefits by Race, Education, and Claiming Age

Geoffrey T. Sanzenbacher and Jorge D. Ramos-Mercado

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