IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mrr/papers/wp219.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Participation and Contributions in Tax-deferred Retirement Accounts: Evidence from Social Security Records

Author

Listed:
  • Marjorie Honig

    (Hunter College and CUNY)

  • Irena Dushi

    (Social Security Administration)

Abstract

Social Security Administration W-2 records contain employee annual tax-deferred contributions for 1990-2003 and sufficient information to calculate tax-deferred contributions for 1984-1989. We use this information to compare tax-deferred contribution profiles of three cohorts of respondents in the Health and Retirement Study to determine whether younger cohorts saved relatively more at the same stage of the life cycle than had older cohorts. We find that participation in tax-deferred retirement plans increased substantially for all cohorts from 1984 to 2003, and that respondents in more recent cohorts were more likely to participate in such plans than respondents of the same ages in the earliest cohort. Their contributions as a percent of earnings were not significantly larger than those of the earliest cohort, however. Despite the increased availability of these employer-provided plans throughout this period, participation rates and contribution amounts remained low among respondents in the lower half of the earnings distribution.

Suggested Citation

  • Marjorie Honig & Irena Dushi, 2010. "Participation and Contributions in Tax-deferred Retirement Accounts: Evidence from Social Security Records," Working Papers wp219, University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center.
    • Handle: RePEc:mrr:papers:wp219
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp219.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marcela PARADA‐CONTZEN, 2023. "Gender, family status and health characteristics: Understanding retirement inequalities in the Chilean pension model," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 162(2), pages 271-303, June.
    2. Ghilarducci, Teresa & Radpour, Siavash & Webb, Anthony, 2022. "Retirement plan wealth inequality: measurement and trends," Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, Cambridge University Press, vol. 21(1), pages 119-139, January.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mrr:papers:wp219. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MRRC Administrator (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/isumius.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.