NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Stochastic Infinite Horizon Forecasts for Social Security and Related Studies

Ronald Lee, Timothy Miller, Michael Anderson

NBER Working Paper No. 10917*
Issued in November 2004
NBER Program(s):   AG    PE

The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this.  You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.

This paper consists of three reports on stochastic forecasting for Social Security, on infinite horizons, immigration, and structural time series models. 1) In our preferred stochastic immigration forecast, total net immigration drops from current levels down to about one million by 2020, then slowly rises to 1.2 million at the end of the century, with 95% probability bounds of 800,000 to 1.8 million at the century's end. Adding stochastic immigration makes little difference to the probability distribution of the old age dependency ratio. 2) We incorporate parameter uncertainty, stochastic trends, and uncertain ultimate levels in stochastic models of wage growth and fertility. These changes sometimes substantially affect the probability distributions of the individual input forecasts, but they make relatively little difference when embedded in the more fully stochastic Social Security projection. 3) Using a 500-year stochastic projection, we estimate an infinite horizon balance of -5.15% of payroll, compared to the -3.5% of the 2004 Trustees Report, probably reflecting different mortality projections. Our 95% probability interval bounds are -10.5 and -1.3%. Such forecasts, which reflect only "routine" uncertainty, have many problems but nonetheless seem worthwhile.

You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.

Information about Free Papers

You should expect a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate associate of the NBER, a journalist, a site with your domain name in ".GOV", or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy.

If you usually get free papers at work/university but do not at home, you can either connect to your work VPN or proxy (if any) or elect to have a link to the paper emailed to your work email address below. The email address must be connected to a subscribing college, university, or other subscribing institution. Gmail and other free email addresses will not have access.

E-mail:

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

 
Publications
Activities
Meetings
Data
People
About

National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-868-3900; email: info@nber.org