Social Security Bulletin最新文献

This article describes the income replacement ratio as a measure of retirement income adequacy and identifies several issues analysts must consider when calculating a replacement ratio. The article presents the income replacement ratios experienced by participants in the original sample cohort of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), who were born between 1931 and 1941. Replacement ratios are shown by the respondent's birth cohort, age when first classified as retired in the HRS, and preretirement income quartile. Median replacement ratios fall as the retirement period grows longer.

Women's labor force participation and earnings dramatically increased after World War II. Those changes have important implications for women's Social Security benefits. This article uses the Social Security Administration's Modeling Income in the Near Term (version 6) to examine Social Security benefits for current and future beneficiary wives. The projections show that fewer wives in more recent birth cohorts will be eligible for auxiliary benefits as spouses because their earnings are too high. If their husbands die, however, most wives will still be eligible for survivor benefits because, despite the increase in their earnings over time, they still typically have lower earnings than their husbands. Even so, the share of wives who would be ineligible for widow benefits is projected to double between cohorts.

Social Security retirement benefits in the United States (US) reflect marital histories and lifetime earnings of current and former married couples. Focusing on the link between marital history and benefit eligibility, this article examines women's marital patterns over the past two decades. Using the 1990 and 2009 Marital History Modules to the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation, descriptive/regression analysis reveals substantial changes in women's marital patterns among baby boomers and generation Xers. Those changes have prompted a decline in qualifying marital histories for Social Security spouse and widow benefits. The findings also reveal substantial variation by race/ethnicity. Black women are significantly more likely to be potentially ineligible for a marriage-based benefit than white women, particularly in more recent cohorts. Hispanic women's marriage-based eligibility is between that of black and white women. US-born Hispanic women had higher shares without a qualifying marital history compared with the foreign born.

This article highlights the prevalence and economic outcomes of financial illiteracy among American households, and reviews previous research that examines how improving financial literacy affects household saving. Analysis of the research literature suggests that previous financial literacy efforts have yielded mixed results. Evidence suggests that interventions provided for employees in the workplace have helped increase household saving, but estimates of the magnitude of the impact vary widely. For financial education initiatives targeted to other groups, the evidence is much more ambiguous, suggesting a need for more econometrically rigorous evaluations.

Various factors outside the control of decision makers may affect the rate at which disability applications are allowed or denied during the initial step of eligibility determination in the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs. In this article, using individual-level data on applications, I estimate the role of three important factors--the demographic characteristics of applicants, the diagnostic mix of applicants, and the local unemployment rate--in affecting the probability of an initial allowance and state allowance rates. I use a random sample of initial determinations from 1993 through 2008 and a fixed-effects multiple regression framework. The empirical results show that the demographic and diagnostic characteristics of applicants and the local unemployment rate substantially affect the initial allowance rate. An increase in the local unemployment rate tends to be associated with a decrease in the initial allowance rate. This negative relationship holds for adult DI and SSI applicants and for SSI childhood applicants.