Report on the impact of social security on private sector savings in the USA - presents the controversial points of view of r j barro and m feldstein concerning capital formation, taking into consideration consumer expenditure in the period from 1929 to 1974, and includes estimates on the reduction of personal savings due to social security wealth. References and statistical tables.

Monograph on the impact of the social security and old age benefit programme on personal saving for retirement in the USA - includes the research methodology. Bibliography pp. 133 to 136, references and statistical tables.

The social security system affects people throughout most of their lives, at work and in retirement. The supposed effects of social security on saving, labor supply, and the distribution of income figure prominently in current debates about whether and how to change the system. Theorists have developed alternative analytical frameworks for studying social security, but all involve extreme assumptions introduced for the sake of analytical tractability. Each study seems to describe the behavior of some, but not all or even most people. The shortcomings of available data have created additional roadblocks. As a result, the effects of social security on saving and labor supply are difficult to measure, and how such a complex system influences behavior is not at all well understood. Yet decisions on social security cannot be avoided. If analysts cannot agree, policymakers are likely to increase the weight they attach to perceptions of equity, adequacy of benefits, fairness of taxes, and similar qualitative considerations. Hence it is desirable for lay observers to understand the framework that analysts use and the reasons why there is so much uncertainty. This book sheds light on social security issues by examining evidence from economic studies about how the system affects saving, labor supply, and income distribution. It shows that these studies provide little evidence to support or refute assertions that social security has reduced saving, but they do indicate that it has contributed to the trend toward early retirement. The author finds that the aged are now about as well off on the average as the general population and that social security has played a considerable role in bringing about this equality. This volume is the sixteenth in the second series of Brookings Studies of Government Finance.

This volume represents the most important work to date on one of the pressing policy issues of the moment: the privatization of social security. Although social security is facing enormous fiscal pressure in the face of an aging population, there has been relatively little published on the fundamentals of essential reform through privatization. Privatizing Social Security fills this void by studying the methods and problems involved in shifting from the current system to one based on mandatory saving in individual accounts. "Timely and important. . . . [Privatizing Social Security] presents a forceful case for a radical shift from the existing unfunded, pay-as-you-go single national program to a mandatory funded program with individual savings accounts. . . . An extensive analysis of how a privatized plan would work in the United States is supplemented with the experiences of five other countries that have privatized plans." —Library Journal "[A] high-powered collection of essays by top experts in the field."—Timothy Taylor, Public Interest

"This paper, which was presented as the 1979 Frank Paish Lecture to the British Association of University Teachers of Economics, provides a non-technical summary of the recent studies of the effects of social security on private saving. The first section discusses the theoretical indeterminacy of the effect of social security while the second part reviews the empirical studies. Although the traditional life cycle theory of saving clearly implies that the anticipation of social security benefits reduces private saving, a richer theoretical framework suggests several reasons why the saving response cannot be unambiguously established by theoretical reasoning. These reasons include the indirect effects of social security on retirement behavior, private pensions, and gifts and bequests. The econometric studies resolve this uncertainty and indicate that social security appears to reduce private saving substantially. These studies include(1) aggregate time series evidence on the U.S. saving rates over the past 50 years, (2) microeconomic evidence on the accumulation of wealth by a large sample of individual households, and (3) international comparisons of saving rates in major industrial countries"--NBER website.

Monograph on effects of social security on aggregate savings-income ratio in the USA - uses an economic model to estimate relationships between capital stock, labour supply and social security, etc., and finds that a regression run for 1947-1974 shows no effect of social security on saving. Bibliography pp. 85 to 88, graphs, references and statistical tables.

In a recent article in the Journal of Political Economy (Leimer and Lesnoy 1982), we presented new time series evidence that cast considerable doubt on earlier evidence presented by Martin Feldstein (1974) which implied that social security had a large and statistically significant negative effect on personal saving in the United States. Our results may be summarized as follows: First, the social security wealth variable used by Feldstein was seriously flawed as a result of a computer-programming error. Simply correcting this error substantially changes the estimated effect of social security on saving. Second, the statistical evidence depends upon assumptions which are embedded in the construction of the social security wealth variable. These assumptions relate, first, to how individuals form their expectations about the social security benefits they expect to receive and the social security taxes they expect to pay and, second, to estimates of the number of workers, dependent wives, and surviving widows who will receive benefits. Adopting reasonable assumptions that differ from those used by Feldstein leads to generally weaker estimates of the relationship between social security and saving. Finally, the estimated relationship between social security and saving is acutely sensitive to the period of estimation examined. We concluded that the time series evidence simply does not support the hypothesis that social security has substantially reduced personal saving in the United States.