IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32843.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Who Benefits from Retirement Saving Incentives in the U.S.? Evidence on Gaps in Retirement Wealth Accumulation by Race and Parental Income

Author

Listed:
  • Taha Choukhmane
  • Jorge Colmenares
  • Cormac O'Dea
  • Jonathan L. Rothbaum
  • Lawrence D.W. Schmidt

Abstract

U.S. employers and the federal government devote over 1.5% of GDP annually toward promoting defined contribution (DC) retirement saving. Using a new employer-employee linked dataset covering millions of Americans, we show that this system of saving incentives benefits White workers and those with richer parents more than their similar-income coworkers who are Black or Hispanic or from lower-income families. Breaking the link between contribution choices and saving subsidies—through revenue-neutral reforms—could close the gaps in DC wealth between White and Black or Hispanic workers and between those with the richest and those with the poorest parents by approximately one-third.

Suggested Citation

  • Taha Choukhmane & Jorge Colmenares & Cormac O'Dea & Jonathan L. Rothbaum & Lawrence D.W. Schmidt, 2024. "Who Benefits from Retirement Saving Incentives in the U.S.? Evidence on Gaps in Retirement Wealth Accumulation by Race and Parental Income," NBER Working Papers 32843, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32843
    Note: AG AP CF LS PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32843.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D14 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Saving; Personal Finance
    • G5 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance
    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
    • H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household
    • J15 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J32 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Nonwage Labor Costs and Benefits; Retirement Plans; Private Pensions

    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:nbr:nberwo:32843. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.