For anyone with an interest in pensions—workers and employers, personnel directors, accountants, actuaries, lawyers, insurance agents, financial analysts, government officials, and social ...scientists—this book is required reading. Now, without the aid of a pension specialist, anyone can determine how their particular pension plan stacks up against the average. Using virtually all available government sources (including computerized data unavailable in print) and their own extensive surveys, the authors present a comprehensive description of the structural features and financial conditions of U.S. private, state, city, and municipal pension plans. The introductions to the hundreds of tables explain and highlight the information. The picture that emerges of the "typical" plan and its significant variations is crucial to all those with a financial stake in pensions. The reader can compare pension vesting, retirement, and benefit provisions by plan type, plan size, industry, union status, and many more characteristics. With this information, workers can evaluate just how generous their employer is; job applicants can compare fringe benefits of prospective employers; personnel directors can judge their competitive edge. The financial community will find especially interesting the analysis of the unfunded liabilities of private, state, and local pension funds. The investment decisions of private and public pension funds and their return performances are described as well. Government officials and social scientists will find the analysis of pension coverage, the receipt of pension income by the elderly, cost-of-living adjustments, and disability insurance of special importance in evaluating the proper degree of public intervention in the area of old age income support. Pensions in the American Economy is comprehensive and easy to use. Every reader, from small-business owners and civil servants to pension fund specialists, will find in it essential information about this increasingly important part of labor compensation and retirement finances.
The current American health care system is beyond repair. The problems of the health care system are delineated in this discussion. The current health care system needs to be replaced in its entirety ...with a new system that provides every American with first-rate, first-tier medicine and that doesn't drive our nation broke. The author describes a 10-point Medical Security System, which he proposes will address the problems of the current health care system.
The True Cost of Social Security Blocker, Alexander W.; Kotlikoff, Laurence J.; Ross, Stephen A. ...
Tax policy and the economy,
01/2019, Letnik:
33, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Implicit government obligations represent the lion’s share of government liabilities in the United States and many other countries. Yet these liabilities are rarely measured, let alone properly ...adjusted for their risk. This paper shows, by example, how modern asset pricing can be used to value implicit fiscal debts taking into account their risk properties. The example is the US Social Security system’s net liability to working-age Americans. Marking this debt to market makes a big difference. Based on our preferred estimate, its market value is 86% higher than the Social Security trustees’ valuation method suggests. Our alternative arbitrage pricing theory specifications range from 74% to 115% higher than that of the Social Security Administration.
This study examines life insurance holdings and financial vulnerabilities among couples approaching returement age. The study builds on Auerbach and Kotlikoff's work. The study adopts a concrete and ...easily understood yardstick for quantifying financial vulnerabilities: the percentage decline in an individual's sustainable living standard that would result from a spouse's death. The use of this yardstick permists one to make apples-to-apples comparisons of vulnerabilities across households, and to investigate correlations between vulnerabilities and insurance coverage.
The realities of mounting government debt, tax burdens, and an aging population raise serious concerns about the financial legacy confronting future generations. How great a fiscal burden will ...current policies leave to subsequent generations, and how might changes in those policies alter the intergenerational distribution of public welfare? Generational accounting has recently emerged as a robust new method of fiscal analysis and planning designed to assess the long-term sustainability of fiscal policy and to measure the extent of the financial load ultimately borne by present and future generations. A seminal contribution to public economics, generational accounting has already been adopted by 23 nations around the world. Combining the latest and most extensive country-by-country generational analyses with a comprehensive review of generational accounting's innovative methodology, these papers are a consummate resource for economists, political scientists, and policy makers concerned with fiscal health and responsibility.
The Coming Generational Storm Burns, Scott; Kotlikoff, Laurence J
2004, 2005, 2005-01-18, 20040101, Letnik:
1
eBook, Book
How to avoid a fiscal crisis in the next generation-- and how to protect yourself if the government acts too late: policy recommendations and individual strategies to protect against skyrocketing tax ...rates, drastically reduced health and retirement benefits, high inflation, and a ruined currency.
This study uses Fehr et al. Fehr, H., Jokisch, S., & Kotlikoff, L. J. (2004a). The role of immigration in dealing with the developed world's demographic transition.
FinanzArchiv, 60, 296–324; Fehr, ...H., Jokisch, S., & Kotlikoff, L. J. (2005). The developed world's demographic transition—the roles of capital flows, immigration, and policy. In R. Brooks & A. Razin (Eds.),
Social security reform (pp. 11–43). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of changes in fertility and mortality on the developed world's demographic transition. The model features three regions – the U.S., Japan, and the EU-15 – and incorporates age- and time-specific fertility and mortality rates, detailed fiscal institutions, and international capital mobility, subject to adjustment costs. The model's life-cycle agents maximize expected utility taking into account the uncertainty of their dates of death. Since there is no altruism, bequests arise solely as a result of incomplete annuitization. The model fits the developed world's demographic, fiscal, and economic initial conditions quite closely.
Our simulations show that, all else equal, higher fertility and lower mortality will, respectively, improve and worsen fiscal and economic conditions along the world's dynamic transition path. But we find that such demographic changes, even when very large in size and relatively quick in nature, would come too late to materially alter the fiscal and economic picture over most of this Century. Indeed, our simulations indicate only minor effects on the developed world's rather bleak baseline transition path prior to roughly 2070 arising from either major increases in fertility rates or major reductions in mortality rates. Although such changes have important long-run fiscal and economic effects, they occur too gradually to materially alter the short- and medium-term outcomes.
Concern with intergenerational justice has long been a focus of economics. This essay considers the effort, over the last three decades, to quantify generational fiscal burdens using label-free ...fiscal gap and generational accounting. It also points out that government debt -- the conventional metric for assessing generational fiscal justice,– has no grounding in economic theory. Instead, official debt is the result of economically arbitrary government labelling decisions: whether to call receipts “taxes” rather than “borrowing” and whether to call payments “transfer payments” rather than “debt service”. Via their choice of words, governments decide which obligations to put on, and which to keep off, the books. The essay also looks to the future of generational fiscal-justice analysis. Rapid computational advances are permitting economists to understand not just direct government intergenerational redistribution, but also how such policies impact the economy that future generations will inherit.
The world's leading economies, both developed and developing, are engaged in an ever-changing economic symbiosis that is governed in large part by demographics and technological change, but also by ...pension, healthcare, and other fiscal policies. This interconnected economic evolution—what economists call general equilibrium growth—holds important implications for inequality across and within generations. This paper presents such a general equilibrium model. It features six goods, five regions, three skill groups, and 91 overlapping generations, each making life-cycle consumption and labour-supply decisions. The model pays special attention to the evolution of the Chinese and Indian economies. Thanks to their rapid technological advance and vast populations, these nations will play an ever more dominant role in determining the world's supplies of capital and labour, particularly unskilled labour. The good news for the developed world is that China and India will supply it with major amounts of capital over time, thanks to their high saving rates. The bad news is that these economies are also likely to bring much more unskilled relative to skilled labour into the market, which will, over time, dramatically reduce the relative wages of unskilled workers in the US, Europe, and Japan. This relative increase in the world supply of unskilled workers reflects, in large part, the simple fact that China and India are gradually bringing each of their skill groups up to Western standards, but have relatively more unskilled labour in their work forces.
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