How Would Financial Risk Affect Retirement Income Under Individual Accounts?

Gary Burtless

Issues in Brief from Center for Retirement Research

Abstract: A popular proposal for reforming Social Security is to supplement or replace traditional publicly financed benefits with a new system of mandatory, defined contribution private pensions. Proponents claim that private plans offer better returns than traditional Social Security. To achieve higher returns, however, contributors are exposed to extra risks associated with financial market fluctuations. This issue in brief offers evidence on the extent of these risks by considering the hypothetical pensions U.S. workers would have obtained during the past century if they had accumulated retirement savings in individual accounts.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-rmg
Date: 2003-03-28
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://crr.bc.edu/images/stories/Briefs/ib_5.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crr:issbrf:ib-5

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Issues in Brief from Center for Retirement Research
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christopher F Baum ().