The aim of traditional retirement planning is to set a wealth accumulation target for your retirement date so that your desired expenditures can be obtained using a “safe” withdrawal rate. But it is quite difficult to know if you are making progress toward this target. Volatility over short...

Focusing on a “safe withdrawal rate” and then deriving a “wealth accumulation target” to achieve by the retirement date is the wrong way to think about retirement planning. Such a formulation isolates the working (accumulation) and retirement (decumulation) phases. When considered...

Section I reviews some of the important contributions using time series evidence to estimate Social Security’s impact on private savings. Essential to these studies is the use of a “Social Security Wealth” (SSW) variable, created by Martin Feldstein (1974), which defines the present value...

Many countries are currently increasing the advanced funding of their public pension systems to improve their sustainability in the face of rapidly aging populations. When pensions are funded, the issue of asset allocation becomes of paramount importance. Standard portfolio selection theory...

Benefit reductions will likely be a part of the eventual Social Security reform in the United States. This research attempts to quantify the intragenerational and intergenerational impacts of different benefit reduction proposals on the incomes of the elderly. Reforms include across-the-board...

An understanding of the financial and distributional consequences of Social Security reform requires knowledge about the actual life circumstances of participants, including the level and pattern of their lifetime earnings and when they retire. Some analyses of Social Security reform make...

In recent years, the share of elderly in the total population is increasing around the world. Rising proportionally are claims on public pension systems and health care expenditures. This places extra pressure on government budgets. As a result, countries which implement only pay-as-you-go...