Latest Reports from the Income & Benefits Policy Center

The lackluster economy, eroding traditional pensions, and volatile stock market suggest that baby boomers - those born between 1945 and 1965 - face increasingly uncertain retirements. Our projections show that lower - and moderate-income boomers will continue to rely on Social Security for most of their retirement income. While the projections reflect some good news - women will reap the rewards of working and earning more than previous generations - they also raise alarms. Between 30 and 40 percent of boomers will not have enough income at age 70 to replace 75 percent of their preretirement earnings, a common standard for measuring retirement income adequacy.

Republicans typically emphasize lower taxes, while casting Democrats as eager to further burden hard-working families. But Republicans delude themselves when they think that Democrats can't play the tax-cutting game as well.

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) provides supplemental nutritious foods, nutrition education, and referrals to other health, welfare, and social services. WIC eligibility is restricted to infants, children age 1 through 4, and pregnant and postpartum women who are either income or adjunctively eligible.

This project extends WIC national eligibility estimates to single years of age for children, produces estimates for each State and the District of Columbia, and updates methods for estimating eligibility in the territories. The project also implemented calculation of standard errors of estimate for national, regional, State, and Puerto Rico estimates.

This report describes the work the Urban Institute performed to generate the Model of Income in the Near Term, Version 6 (MINT6). MINT is a tool developed for the Social Security Administration (SSA) to analyze the distributional consequences of Social Security reform proposals. MINT is a micro-level data file of individuals born between 1926 and 2075. It starts with a rich set of income and demographic characteristics from the 2001 and 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data linked to SSA data on earnings and benefits. MINT then projects these characteristics until death or the year 2099.

The recession has increased joblessness among older Americans. These graphs and tables report unemployment rates and how they have varied by age, sex, race, and education since 2007.

The High Growth Job Training Initiative (HGJTI) was a national grant program administered by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Employment and Training Administration (ETA). Between 2001 and 2007, more than 160 grants were awarded to establish industry-focused job training and related projects designed to meet the industry’s workforce challenges. This report is the third and final in a series from the national evaluation of the HGJTI conducted by the Urban Institute, the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and Capital Research Corporation. This report documents the national initiative, describes the structure and implementation of projects by selected grantees, and provides nonexperimental analysis of the early impacts of job training in selected HGJTI-funded programs. The analysis relies on a review of grant applications and quarterly reports; visits to nine selected grantee sites; data collected from grantee training programs; quarterly earnings data from state unemployment insurance wage records; and administrative data from state and local public workforce system agencies.

The retirement savings of American households took a big hit when the stock market crashed in 2008. Recently, however, a good portion of these losses has been reversed. This fact sheet follows trends in retirement account balances since the beginning of 2005.

A little more than a year ago, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform produced a report that proposed restructuring Social Security. However, the commission failed to get the supermajority needed to recommend the plan to Congress. While some in the media and on the political scene called the report a useful starting point, no action was taken to reshape Social Security in 2011. With presidential and congressional elections coming in November, the topic is sure to heat back up. This video features Melissa Favreault, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute's Program on Retirement Policy, discussing the ways the Bowles-Simpson plan would change Social Security, who would be affected the most, and what the timeframe is for taking action.

An important dimension of AFDC/TANF programs is the disincentives to work recipients face due to the reduction in benefits that comes with an increase in earnings. These disincentives can be represented as average (implicit) tax rates that depend directly on policy variables including the maximum benefit and the disregard policy in states. To help those interested in better understanding these implicit tax rates, we have provided a dataset of relevant summary variables including the maximum benefit, the effective tax rate on the first $500 of earnings (in 2010 dollars), the effective tax rate on a part-time full-month minimum wage job, and how these measures vary across families of different sizes for each state in each year from 1996 to 2010. The dataset and accompanying tables were derived from the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, and are available as a PDF file (with documentation/discussion) or as an Excel file and Stata dataset.

Economists frequently assume that employees “pay for” employer-provided fringe benefits, such as contributions to retirement plans, in the form of reduced wages. This paper challenges these assumptions. Because low-income employees receive little tax benefit from saving in qualified retirement plans, they may not be willing to accept a one dollar reduction in their wage in return for an additional dollar contributed to their 401(k) plan. We find that employers reduce wages of high-income workers by 90 to 99 cents for every dollar contributed to a 401(k) plan, but they reduce wages of low-income workers by only 11 to 29 cents.