How Does Differential Mortality Affect Social Security Finances and Progressivity? Working Paper 2005-05

The Congressional Budget Office Long-Term (CBOLT) model uses dynamic micro-simulation for a representative sample of the population to analyze the aggregate and distributional effects of Social Security policy. In the model, overall mortality rates by age and sex are calibrated to match Social Security Trustees projections, and differential mortality (the difference in death rates across socioeconomic groups) is introduced using a combination of disability-specific mortality and a technique for the non-disabled developed by Lillard and Panis (1999). In this paper, the question of how