It is generally accepted that the Social Security program pays women a higher average ratio of lifetime benefits to lifetime taxes than it does men. Social Security’s progressive benefit structure and annuity payment combine with women’s lower average earnings and longer average life spans...

This article examines the problem of response error in survey earnings data. Comparing workers’ earnings reports in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to their detailed W-2 earnings records from the Social Security Administration, we employ...

The long-term shift in coverage from defined benefit (DB) pensions to defined contribution (DC) plans may accelerate rapidly as more large companies freeze their DB pensions and replace them with new or enhanced DC plans. This paper uses the Model of Income in the Near Term to simulate the...

This paper examines methods of decomposing a difference in levels between groups for a dependent variable such as income. Applied to regression equations, this technique estimates the contribution to the difference from divergent characteristics and divergent rates of converting characteristics...

This article examines proposals to transfer Social Security benefits from married couples to surviving widows in terms of effects on poverty rates, trust fund expenditures, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) expenditures. Because widows are much more likely to be living in poverty than older...