The 1996 grant produced a paper,"The Adequacy of Household Saving," co-authored with Eric Engen of the Federal Reserve Board and Cori E. Uccello of the Urban Institute.
The paper analyzed the adequacy of savings for retirement using a stochastic, life-cycle model and compared these results against previous surveys and research. The authors studied data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). With this data they found that more than half of married households where the husband works full-time had observed wealth-earnings ratios that exceeded the median simulated wealth-earnings target for households with the same characteristics. They found that wealth accumulation was generally adequate for all but those in the bottom quartile of the wealth-earnings distribution, where the findings were less conclusive and more pessimistic. Given that their findings appeared initially to vary significantly from other studies, the researchers argued that careful interpretation showed that their findings were generally in line with other works on this subject. They recommended caution in interpreting the results in that the study did not validate the soundness of the specific saving plans of individual households. Also, they noted limitations in the ability to account for and measure the impact of a myriad of factors that could affect the adequacy of savings. The study forewarns of future retirement savings problems. It included documentation on the one-third of the middle-aged population who haven't begun planning for retirement, and the 20 percent of a demographically-varied segment of the population who do not have any checking or savings account.
The paper was published in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1999, volume 2. Also, two earlier papers adapted from the project were published. "Will The Baby Boom Be Ready For Retirement?" as published in the Brookings Review (Summer 1997). The other, "Are mericans Saving Enough for Retirement," was published in The Century Fund conference volume, Life in an Older America (1999).
