How Exits from the Labor Force of Death Impact Household Incomes: A Four Country Comparison of Public and Private Income Support
dc.contributor.author | Burkhauser, Richard V. | |
dc.contributor.author | Giles, Phil | |
dc.contributor.author | Lillard, Dean | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2007-04-26T13:36:13Z | |
dc.date.available | 2007-04-26T13:36:13Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2002-07 | |
dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/50587 | |
dc.description.abstract | Government policies attempt to mitigate the economic risks to households of major life transitions. This paper focuses on two such transitions that social security systems typically insure against-long term exits from the labor market (retirement, disability, unemployment insurance) and the death of a household head or spouse (survivor’s insurance). We examine labor force exits of men at various ages in four countries--Canada, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States-using data from the Cross-National Equivalent File, a matched longitudinal data set. We focus on how average net-of-tax household income changes in the years before and after the event. We find that when one measures the change in economic well-being following a labor market exit by the fraction of lost labor earnings replaced by social security income, the decline in the household’s economic well-being is substantially overstated. When we compare net-of-tax household income before and after a long term exit from the labor market, we find that such drops are much less than those implied by a social security replacement rate and that differences across countries in the average drop are much less than those based on a social security replacement rate. We find the same pattern when we focus on how net-of-tax household income changes in the years before and after the death of a head or spouse. Declines in net-of-tax household income following such a death are much lower than the decline implied by a replacement of the deceased person’s labor earnings and social security benefits by their household’s post-death social security income. But the size of the change in individualized net-of-tax income following the death of a head or spouse is greatly affected by assumptions used to adjust for changes in household size. | en |
dc.description.sponsorship | Social Security Administration | en |
dc.format.extent | 685330 bytes | |
dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
dc.language.iso | en_US | en |
dc.publisher | Michigan Retirement Research Center, University of Michigan, P.O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 | en |
dc.relation.ispartofseries | WP 2002-033 | en |
dc.title | How Exits from the Labor Force of Death Impact Household Incomes: A Four Country Comparison of Public and Private Income Support | en |
dc.type | Working Paper | en |
dc.subject.hlbsecondlevel | Population and Demography | |
dc.subject.hlbtoplevel | Social Sciences | |
dc.contributor.affiliationother | Cornell University | en |
dc.contributor.affiliationother | DIW | en |
dc.contributor.affiliationother | Statistics Canada | en |
dc.contributor.affiliationother | Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg | en |
dc.contributor.affiliationumcampus | Ann Arbor | en |
dc.description.bitstreamurl | http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/50587/1/wp033.pdf | en_US |
dc.owningcollname | Retirement and Disability Research Center, Michigan (MRDRC) |
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