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Social Security and Unsecured Debt

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Author Info
Erik Hurst
Paul Willen

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Abstract

Most young households simultaneously hold both unsecured debt on which they pay an average of 10 percent interest and social security wealth on which they earn less than 2 percent. We document this fact using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We then consider a life-cycle model with optimizing and rule-of-thumb' households and explore ways to reduce this inefficiency. We show that both allowing households to use social security wealth to pay off debt and exempting young households from social security contributions (but in both cases requiring higher contributions later later in life) leads to increases in welfare for both types of households and significant increases in consumption and saving, and reductions in debt, for optimizing households.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 10282.

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Date of creation: Feb 2004
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10282

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
E2 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment
E6 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Alessandro Bucciol, 2006. "The Roles of Temptation and Social Security in Explaining Individual Behavior," "Marco Fanno" Working Papers 0032, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche "Marco Fanno". [Downloadable!]
  2. Alan D. Viard, 2006. "The welfare effects of pay-as-you-go retirement programs: the role of tax and benefit timing," Working Papers 0602, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. [Downloadable!]
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