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Abstract:Media reports predicted that the stock market decline in October 2008 would cause changes in retirement intentions, due to declines in retirement assets. We use panel data from the Health and Retirement Study to investigate the relationship between stock market performance and retirement intentions during 1998–2008, a period that includes the recent crisis. While we find a weak negative correlation between stock returns and retirement intentions, further investigation suggests that this relationship is not driven by wealth shocks brought about by stock market fluctuations, but by other factors that are correlated with both the stock market and retirement intentions.

Executive Summary Implicit taxes are present in many government programs and can create substantial work disincentives. The implicit tax created by Social Security is the payroll tax used to fund the retirement portion of Social Security minus the present value of the incremental retirement benefits associated with the earnings. While the payroll tax is always 10.6%, the implicit tax varies over a worker’s career because additional earnings translate nonlinearly into additional retirement benefits. We show that workers at the start of their careers experience lower implicit tax rates, as the increase in benefits from additional work is relatively large. However, workers who are closer to retirement earn little or no additional benefit from additional work. The main implicit tax in Medicare lies in the Medicare as Secondary Payer (MSP) policy, which requires Medicare to be a secondary payer for Medicare-eligible workers whose employers offer a health plan and have 20 or more employees. Thus, affected workers effectively forgo the Medicare benefits that they would have received if they had not been working. We investigate a combination of policies that can reduce average implicit tax rates on older workers by as much as 45%.

Social Security is widely believed to protect its recipients from inflation because benefits are indexed to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). However, the CPI-W may not accurately reflect the experience of retirees for two reasons. First, retirees generally have higher medical expenses than workers, and medical costs, in recent years, have tended to rise faster than the prices of other goods. Second, even if medical costs did not rise faster than the prices of other goods, as retirees aged, their medical spending would still tend to increase as a share of income; that is, each cohort of retirees would still see a decline in the real income available for non-medical spending. We show that, for in the 1918 birth cohort, Social Security benefits net of average out-of-pocket medical expenses have declined relative to a price index for non-medical goods by around 20 percent for men, and by around 27 percent for women. We explore alternative options for indexing Social Security benefits and discuss the impact of these alternatives on Social Security's long-term finances.