In this paper, I analyze the impact of social security wealth, retirement payments, and living expenses during retirement on people's retirement savings in general, and on their individual pension holdings in particular, using micro data from a 1996 Japanese household survey. I confirm a replacement effect of social security on saving for all types of households and on individual pensions for self-employed households only. This suggests that the social security assets of self-employed households are less than their optimal level of annuitized assets and that they would increase their demand for individual pensions if social security benefits were to be reduced. Copyright 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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