The cost of the Medicare program will increase dramatically as the baby boom generation reaches retirement. Results from the Congressional Budget Office Long-Term Model (CBOLT) indicate that Medicare costs will equal more than 9 percent of GDP by 2078. This paper considers the impact of...

Imagine a longitudinal micro data file that contains individual earnings along with basic demographic variables such as age, sex, education, marital status, and spouse’s characteristics for a representative future sample of the population. Such a data set would be invaluable for analyzing...

Social Security reforms that include individual accounts change both the expected benefit and the benefit risk. This article uses a long-term stochastic forecasting model to estimate the distribution of expected benefits under a simple individual account, recognizing uncertainties in the current...

Demographic trends and projections of continued slow productivity growth have led to significant concern about the viability of Social Security and Medicare in the next century. In addition to these gloomy predictions about public retirement programs, fundamental changes that are occurring in...

This paper presents a method for projecting person-level labor force participation and earnings for the U.S. population in a dynamic micro-simulation setting. A dynamic micro-simulation model starts with economic and demographic data for a current sample of the population, then stochastically...

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...

This paper describes a strategy for estimating predictive equations that has been shown to work well in microsimulation modeling. The technique, referred to here as “age-centered regression,” is particularly useful when the available data set for estimating a model equation is limited and...

This paper uses a series of cross-section wealth surveys to measure how wealth accumulation and active saving rates varied across cohort-groups during the early and mid 1990s. Our estimated rates of saving and wealth change across cohorts show a somewhat more dramatic life cycle pattern than...