NBER Publications by Andrew Davenport

Despite the enormous gains in the economic well-being of the elderly, and the progressivity of the Social Security benefit schedule, there remains substantial inequality in financial resources. In this paper we use data from the Health and Retirement Survey to examine the distribution of pension wealth in relation to other private wealth. We pay particular attention to differences by sex and race. We find that men are approximately 50 percent more likely to have pensions than are women, and conditional on having a pension, the mean value for men is twice as great as that for women. These differences remain significant even when factors such as industry, occupation, and tenure are controlled for. Differences by race are smaller than differences by sex but are still significant. We find...