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Are Americans Saving “Optimally” for Retirement?
Abstract
We solve each household’s optimal saving decisions using a life cycle model that incorporates uncertain lifetimes, uninsurable earnings and medical expenses, progressive taxation, government transfers, and pension and social security benefits. With optimal decision rules, we compare, household by household, wealth predictions from the life cycle model using a nationally representative sample. We find, making use of household‐specific earnings histories, that the model accounts for more than 80 percent of the 1992 cross‐sectional variation in wealth. Fewer than 20 percent of households have less wealth than their optimal targets, and the wealth deficit of those who are undersaving is generally small.
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Cited by
The Economic Importance of Financial Literacy: Theory and Evidence
Lusardi, A., & Mitchell, O. S. (2014) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.52.1.5 · Cited by 4,698
Financial Literacy, Retirement Planning and Household Wealth
van Rooij, M. C. J., Lusardi, A., & Alessie, R. J. M. (2012) · The Economic Journal · doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2012.02501.x · Cited by 936
Optimal Financial Knowledge and Wealth Inequality
Lusardi, A., Michaud, P.-C., & Mitchell, O. S. (2017) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/690950 · Cited by 690
The Economic Importance of Financial Literacy: Theory and Evidence
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Sufficient Statistics for Welfare Analysis: A Bridge Between Structural and Reduced-Form Methods
Chetty, R. (2009) · Annual Review of Economics · doi:10.1146/annurev.economics.050708.142910 · Cited by 666
Metadata
- Authors
- Scholz, J. K., Seshadri, A., & Khitatrakun, S.
- Venue
- Journal of Political Economy
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 2006-08
- Volume
- 114
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 607-643
- ISSN
- 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-534X
- OpenAlex
- W4254685632
- Cited by
- 530
- References
- 2
- FWCI
- 97.74
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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