This project develops a new defined contribution and 401(k) plan pension calculator to work with the matched employer pension data in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), and the National Longitudinal Study of Mature Women (NLS-MW). The calculator employs researcher-defined wage and voluntary contribution histories, rates of return, inflation rates, along with pension plan and individual characteristics to calculate a large number of important output measures commonly used in retirement and saving research, including the present value of future pension entitlements, time series of employer and employee contributions, and employer matching rates for 401(k) contributions. The calculator can be used for a wide variety of pension analysis, including simulations. An important innovation is the integration and use of administrative covered earnings and W-2 data from the Social Security Administration (SSA). The calculator will have broad application in research on the labor force participation and retirement saving of older workers and retirement income security. The current version of the calculator runs in SAS. The proposed research will (1) extend the capabilities to include additional features of value to researchers interested in retirement, saving, and elderly income security issues, such as annuity payouts and links to restricted-access administrative SSA earnings histories, (2) provide to the research community users' guides and versions of the calculator that run in SAS and STATA, the two most popular statistical packages used by researchers in this area and two of the data formats supported by the HRS data distribution system, (3) provide SAS and STATA versions of the calculator to run on the matched pension data in the 1998 HRS, 1998 PSID, 1983 SCF, 1989 SCF, and the 1989 NLS-MW, and (4) analyze the soon-to-be-released 1998 HRS and PSID pension plan characteristics data. ? ?
