The Wealth of Cohorts: Retirement Saving and the Changing Assets of Older Americans

David Wise () and Steven Venti

No 4600, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Personal retirement accounts are becoming an increasingly important form of retirement saving. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the paper considers the effect of this change on the assets of recent retirees and persons who are approaching retirement. Much of the analysis is based on comparison of younger and older cohorts with different lengths of exposure to personal retirement saving programs. The findings suggest that personal retirement saving has already added substantially to the personal financial assets of older families. Projections imply that the personal financial assets of the cohort that will attain age 76 in 28 years will be almost twice as large as the personal financial assets of the cohort that attained age 76 in 1991. The results indicate also that to date there has been little replacement of employer-provided pension saving with personal retirement saving. Together with evidence that personal financial saving is unrelated to changes in home equity, the results suggest that personal retirement saving will lead to an important increase in the overall wealth of the elderly.

Date: 1993-12
Note: LS AG
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4600.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Wealth of Cohorts: Retirement Saving and the Changing Assets of Older Americans (1996)
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:nbr:nberwo:4600

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4600
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().