Changes in American family and work patterns over the past decades have prompted various policy proposals for changing the structure of Social Security benefits. In this article, we use the Social Security Administration's Modeling Income in the Near Term (MINT) microsimulation model to project...

Over the last three decades, earnings have grown faster for college graduates than for workers without a 4-year college degree. Such wage-growth differentials could affect the Social Security benefits and other retirement income of future retirees. A Social Security Administration...

This article explores how faster rates of wage growth for college graduates than for nongraduates could affect the Social Security benefits of future retirees. Using a Social Security Administration microsimulation model called Modeling Income in the Near Term, the authors estimate the effect of...

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 article uses a microsimulation model to estimate how freezing all remaining private-sector and one-third of all public-sector defined benefit (DB) pension plans over the next 5 years would affect retirement incomes of baby boomers. If frozen plans were supplemented with new or enhanced...

As part of an ongoing effort to analyze the distributional implications of potential policy reforms to the U.S. Social Security system, we consider the widely discussed reform of earnings sharing. Such an approach has been viewed as a way to “update” Social Security's family benefits based...