Over the past several decades, there have been a number of economic and demographic changes that are expected to impact the economic well-being of the future aged population. This paper analyzes the factors that may be related to increased or decreased poverty among the 62 to 89-year-old...

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...

The booms and busts of the late 1990s and 2000s have taken 401(k) plan participants on a rollercoaster ride. Using data from administrative tax records and household surveys, this paper examines how participants responded to these periods of economic expansions and contractions by documenting...

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...

This report describes the work the Urban Institute performed to generate the Model of Income in the Near Term, Version 5 (MINT5). MINT is a tool developed for The Division of Policy Evaluation (DPE) of the Social Security Administration (SSA) to analyze the distributional consequences of Social...

This article examines how retirement income at age 67 is likely to change for baby boomers and persons born in generation X (GenX) compared with current retirees. We use the Social Security Administration's Modeling Income in the Near Term (MINT) model to project retirement income and assets,...

This paper simulates the impact of the 2008 stock market crash on future retirement savings under alternative scenarios. If stocks remain depressed as after the 1974 crash, 20 percent of pre-boomers born 1941-45 and 22 percent of late boomers born 1961-65 would see their retirement incomes drop...

Blacks, Hispanics, and divorced women have historically experienced double-digit poverty rates in retirement, and divorce and other demographic trends will increase their representation in future retiree populations. For these reasons, we might expect an increase in the proportion of...

For decades, policymakers have discussed how to remedy the high poverty rates of older widows. Yet older divorced women are more likely to be poor than older widows, and historical divorce and remarriage trends suggest that in the future a larger share of retired women will be divorced. This...