Over at FedSmith, Brenton Smith writes on the Social Security benefits paid to the children of retirement-age fathers, known as the “second-litter subsidy.” If a person of retirement age has a child, they are allowed to receive a child benefit in addition to their own retirement benefits, regardless of their income.
But as Smith points out, there’s more going on than simply a facet of the benefit formula, including politics and intergenerational fairness. Read on.
Read more!Elizabeth Bauer, an actuary who Tweets as Jane the Actuary, has begun writing longer-form piece for Forbes, with an emphasis on retirement policy. You can access here Forbes articles here, and here are direct link to her first batch. Well worth reading.
No, Andrew McCabe Isn't 'Losing His Pension'
(How) Should We Make Social Security Fairer For Moms?
Social Security Isn't Fair - And That's Actually The Point
News Flash: The U.K. Adopts My Social Security Reform Proposal
Take Cover - It's Another Retirement Reform Proposal
Read more!The Retirement-Consumption Puzzle: New Evidence from Personal Finances
by Arna Olafsson, Michaela Pagel - #24405 (AG AP LS)
Abstract:
This paper uses a detailed panel of individual spending, income,
account balances, and credit limits from a personal finance
management software provider to investigate how expenditures,
liquid savings, and consumer debt change around retirement. The
longitudinal nature of our data allows us to estimate individual
fixed-effects regressions and thereby control for all selection
on time-invariant (un)observables. We provide new evidence on
the retirement-consumption puzzle and on whether individuals save
adequately for retirement. We find that, upon retirement,
individuals reduce their spending in both work-related and
leisure categories. However, we feel that it is difficult to
tell conclusively whether expenses are work related or not, even
with the best data. We thus look at household finances and find
that individuals delever upon retirement by reducing consumer
debt and increasing liquid savings. We argue that these findings
are difficult to rationalize via, for example, work-related
expenses. A rational agent would save before retirement because
of the expected fall in income, and dissave after retirement,
rather than the exact opposite
http://papers.nber.org/papers/w24405?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw
Philip Armour Cornell University
Michigan Retirement Research Center Research Paper No. 2017-373
Abstract:
This paper examines how the 2014 reintroduction of the Social Security statement, staggered by every fifth birth year, affected American Life Panel respondents’ Social Security expectations, savings behavior, and labor supply. The rich panel design of the ALP allows for controls for prior Social Security knowledge and behavior, and a specialized module fielded to ALP respondents elicited recall of the Statement and use of alternate information. The majority of individuals who were sent a Statement recall receiving one, with high rates of nonrecall concentrated among younger respondents. Statement recipients and my Social Security account holders highly value the information therein for retirement planning. Recipients measurably increased their likelihood of expecting future benefits, especially disability benefits, and were less pessimistic about future cuts to the program. Recipients were more likely to work after receipt, especially younger workers, although those already working more than 40 hours per week decreased their hours worked on the intensive margin. There were no statistically significant effects on retirement savings, although additional research is required for estimating heterogeneous effects.
Read more!
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