The goal of securing adequate resources in retirement dominates the ongoing debate regarding social security reforms designed to accommodate the demographic transformation and to provide minimum income security to retired workers. Policy proposals concerned with the implication of future public sector costs emphasize greater individual responsibility for meeting retirement resource goals. Proposals seeking minimum living standards imply expansion of public fiscal liabilities. We contribute to this discussion by examining the extent to which a cohort of US retirees were able to meet resource adequacy standards at the time of retirement, and to maintain initial levels of resources over the first decade of retirement. We compare annuitized wealth, including social security and pension wealth, to two adequacy standards—a household’s preretirement earnings (reflecting the goal of maintaining preretirement consumption) and the US poverty threshold (reflecting the goal of meeting minimum consumption standards). We analyze the relationship of individual characteristics to changes in resource adequacy over time, and identify the characteristics of those who gain and lose resources over the first decade of retirement. Finally, we simulate the effects on adequacy and public sector benefit costs of four social insurance policy proposals. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 14 (2007) Issue (Month): 4 (August) Pages: 481-502 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)