The health and welfare of those who have retired are strongly influenced by their economic circumstances. Incomes in retirement are readily determined for those who have already retired, but information has been relatively poor for projecting major components of retirement income and wealth, social security and pensions, for those ho have not yet reached retirement age. The proposed project will provide new information on these two major sources of wealth and income in retirement, pension and social security savings and wealth, and will analyze their expected values for those approaching retirement age. Moreover, using the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), actual pensions and social security benefits can be computed for the currently employed and compared with peoples' expectations of these benefits, for a representative older population and drawing on administrative and employer-supplied records. This project has six specific aims: 1. To calculate pension and social security wealth using employer-provided pension descriptions for HRS respondents; 2. To fully describe the distribution of these pension and social security outcomes across major groups in the population; 3. To discuss the incentives that the pension and social security benefit structures create for various dimensions of work, retirement and savings; 4. To analyze the determinants of these outcomes, and in particular their relation to the objectives of workers and firms who have adopted and shaped their pensions; 5. To derive implications from the analysis of pension and social security benefits for the design of software used to calculate pension and social security wealth and savings for the HRS. 6. To make recommendations to the research community, including the HRS Steering Committee and the Data Monitoring Committee regarding: the specification of summary pension and social security wealth measures supplied to users of the HRS; the design of pension and social security questions to be included on future waves of the HRS; and the strategy to use for future collection of employer provided and administrative data.
