Andrew A. Samwick
Research Associate
Dartmouth College
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This paper analyzes the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on the total provision of public goods in a framework in which consumers who may make such voluntary contributions to public goods via CSR are also voters who decide on the level of taxes to finance publicly provided public...
Financial aid programs enable students from families with fewer financial resources to pay less to attend college than other students from families with greater financial resources. When income is uncertain, a means-tested financial aid formula that requires more of an Expected Family Contribution...
Author(s) - Andrew Samwick
Recent federal legislation has linked the price paid for health insurance benefits to current income. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, individuals and families with income as high as 400 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for premium tax credits that limit...
November 2, 2017 - Chapter
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
Recent federal legislation has linked the price paid for health insurance benefits to current income. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, individuals and families with income as high as 400 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for premium tax credits that limit...
Policy uncertainty can reduce individual welfare when individuals have limited opportunities to mitigate or insure against consumption fluctuations induced by the policy uncertainty. For this reason, policy uncertainty surrounding future Social Security benefits may have important welfare costs. We...
January 22, 2013 - Chapter
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
Approximately 10 percent of school-age children in the United States are enrolled in private schools, relieving the financial burden on public school systems, and the taxpayers who support them, of the cost of their education. At present, the tax code does not allow families who provide this...
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
Approximately 10 percent of school-age children in the United States are enrolled in private schools, relieving the financial burden on public school systems, and the taxpayers who support them, of the cost of their education. At present, the tax code does not allow families who provide this...
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
In recent years, federal legislation has linked the price paid for health insurance benefits to measures of current income. Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, individuals and families with income as high as 400% of the federal poverty level are eligible for subsidies that...
Households approaching retirement face political uncertainty in their retirement opportunities due to the long-term actuarial deficit in the Social Security program. We field an original internet survey to analyze the impact of this uncertainty on household welfare and behavior. On average, our...
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
This project considers the optimal design of Social Security taxes when households' saving decisions include motives like housing, education, and uncertainty in addition to retirement. At issue is the timing, not the expected present value, of taxes over the working lifetime. A 10-year, revenue...
June 1, 2009 - Chapter
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
March 4, 2009 - Chapter
Author(s) - Andrew Samwick
January 14, 2009 - Chapter
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
This paper analyzes changes in the progressivity of the Social Security benefit formula as a means of lessening the risk inherent in investment-based Social Security reform. Focusing on a single cohort of workers, it simulates the distribution of benefits subject to both earnings and financial risks...
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
This paper analyzes changes in the progressivity of the Social Security benefit formula as a means of lessening the risk inherent in investment-based Social Security reform. Focusing on a single cohort of workers who will reach their normal retirement age as the Social Security trust fund is...
We estimate consumers' valuation of disability insurance using a stochastic lifecycle framework in which disability is modeled as permanent, involuntary retirement. We base our probabilities of worklimiting disability on 25 years of data from the Current Population Survey and examine the changes in...
January 1, 2003 - Chapter
January 1, 2002 - Chapter
This paper presents several alternative social security reform options in which the projected level of benefits for every future cohort of retirees is as high as or higher than the benefits projected in current law. These future benefits can be achieved without any increase in the payroll tax or in...
This paper presents several alternative Social Security reform options in which the projected level of benefits for every future cohort of retirees is as high or higher than the benefits projected in current law. These future benefits can be achieved without any increase in the payroll tax or in...
January 1, 2001 - Chapter
January 1, 2001 - Chapter
In an earlier paper we analyzed a method of combining traditional tax financed pay-as-you-go Social Security benefits with annuities financed by Personal Retirement Accounts. We showed that such a combination could maintain the level of retirement income projected in current Social Security law...
This paper explores the relationship between household marginal income tax rates, the set of assets that households own, and the portfolio shares accounted for by each of these assets. It analyzes data from the 1983, 1989, 1992, and 1995 Surveys of Consumer Finances and develops a new algorithm for...
Empirical research on executive compensation has focused almost exclusively on the incentives provided to chief executive officers. However, firms are run by teams of managers, and a theory of the firm should also explain the distribution of incentives and responsibilities for other members of the...
Do firms systematically over- or underinvest as a result of agency problems? We develop a contracting model between shareholders and managers in which managers have private benefits or private costs of investment. Managers overinvest when they have private benefits and underinvest when they have...
In this paper we study the transition from a pay-as-you-go system of Social Security pensions to an investment-based system in an economy in which portfolio returns and capital profitability are both uncertain. The paper extends earlier studies by Feldstein and Samwick that modeled the transition...
A program of Personal Retirement Accounts (PRAs) funded by deposits equal to 2.3 percent of earnings (up to the Social Security maximum) would permit retirees to receive more income in retirement than with the current Social Security program while at the same time making it unnecessary to increase...
January 1, 1999 - Article
...a system that would restore solvency to the program by establishing contributions to individual accounts, while at the same time stabilizing the payroll tax rate at its current rate, and provide a higher level of retirement income than is implied by the existing Social Security law. For those...
November 1, 1998 - Article
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
As much as one-fourth of the decline in labor force participation in the early postwar period can be attributed to the growth in pension coverage. Since World War II, workers have been retiring at earlier ages. Between 1950 and 1989, the labor force participation rates of men decreased from 46...
The principal-agent model of executive compensation is of central importance to the modern theory of the firm and corporate governance, yet the existing empirical evidence supporting it is quite weak. The key predication of the model is that the executive's pay-performance sensitivity is decreasing...
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
If the United States switched to a broad-based consumption tax, than all forms of saving would enjoy the tax-preferred status reserved primarily for retirement saving vehicles under the current income tax system. Because pensions have other unique characteristics besides their tax advantage, current...
How has the emergence of defined contribution pension plans, such as 401(k)s, affected the financial security of future retirees? We consider this question using a detailed survey of pension formulas in the Survey of Consumer Finances. Our simulations show that average and median pension benefits...
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
Using a unique dataset that links the economic and demographic information of households with the details of their pension formulas, I estimate the combined effect of Social Security and pension benefits on the probability of retirement in a cross-section of the population near retirement age. The...
January 1, 1998 - Chapter
November 1, 1997 - Article
... prefunding Social Security and Medicare benefits would avoid the need for any tax increases 20 years or more from now. Because of increasing life expectancy, if no changes are made to the current Social Security and Medicare systems, then based on estimates by the Congressional Budget Office,...
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
As many countries consider the privatization of existing pay-as-you-go Social Security systems, the option to make participation in the new system voluntary may appeal to policy makers who need to obtain the political support of their workers. A critical issue in evaluating such a reform and its...
In this paper, we analyze the relationship between age and portfolio structure for households in the US. We focus on both the probability that households of different ages own particular portfolio assets and the fraction of their net worth allocated to each asset category. We distinguish between age...
This paper presents a detailed analysis of the economics of prefunding benefits for the aged, focusing on Social Security but indicating some of the analogous magnitudes for prefunding Medicare Benefits. We use detailed Census and Social Security information to model the transition to a fully funded...
Together, pensions, social security and health insurance account for half of the wealth held by all households in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), for 60 percent of total wealth of HRS households who are in the 45th to 55th wealth percentiles, and even for 48 percent of wealth for those in the...
January 1, 1997 - Chapter
This paper presents a detailed analysis of the economics of prefunding benefits for the aged, focusing on social security but indicating some of the analogous magnitudes for prefunding Medicare benefits. We use detailed census and social security information to model the transition to a fully funded...
This paper analyzes the transition from the existing pay-as-you-go Social Security program to a system of funded Mandatory" Individual Retirement Accounts (MIRAs). Because of the high return on real capital relative to the very low return in a mature pay-as-you-go program, the benefits that can be...
We argue that strategic interactions between firms in an oligopoly can explain the puzzling lack of high-powered incentives in executive compensation contracts written by shareholders whose objective is to maximize the value of their shares. We derive the optimal compensation contracts for managers...
There has been rapid growth in `self-directed' pension programs such as the 401(k) plan. Because such plans are voluntary, there is concern that many workers neglecting to contribute will reach retirement with inadequate pension saving. First, we show that people who are eligible for 401(k)s, do not...
January 1, 1996 - Chapter
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
Author(s) - Andrew A. Samwick
The precipitous decline in tax sheltered investments after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA) is widely attributed to the passive loss rules. These rules disallowed losses from activities in which the taxpayer did not materially participate as a current deduction against all sources of income except...
This paper uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to provide some of the first direct evidence that wealth is systematically higher for consumers with greater income uncertainty. However, the apparent pattern of precautionary saving is not consistent with a standard parameterization of the life...
We estimate the fraction of the wealth of a sample of PSID respondents that is held because some households face greater income uncertainty than others. We first derive an equation characterizing the theoretical relationship between wealth and uncertainty in a buffer-stock model of saving. Next, we...
The social security payroll tax has become the largest tax paid by the majority of American households. Although, the statutory marginal social security tax rate is the same for all those with wage and salary income up to the maximum level, the complex rules linking social security taxes and...
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