Changing Social Security Survivorship Benefits and the Poverty of Widows

Michael Hurd () and David Wise ()

No 3843, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The paper considers the effect on widows' poverty of changes in Social Security survivorship benefits, by a reduction in couples' benefits so that total Social Security cost is unchanged. A twenty percent increase in survivorship benefits, for example, would reduce the 1989 poverty rate of widows aged 65 to 69 by about twenty-four percent, from 0.25 to 0.19. The poverty rate of couples would be increased by about thirty-three percent, from about 0.06 to about 0.08.

Date: 1991-09
Note: AG
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Published as The Economic Effects of Aging in the United States and Japan, Michael D. Hurd and Naohiro Yashiro, eds., pp. 319-332, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Published as Changing Social Security Survivorship Benefits and the Poverty of Widows , Michael D. Hurd, David A. Wise. in The Economic Effects of Aging in the United States and Japan , Hurd and Yashiro. 1996

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Chapter: Changing Social Security Survivorship Benefits and the Poverty of Widows (1996)
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