TY  - JOUR
AU  - Wise,David A.
AU  - Venti,Steven F.
TI  - The Wealth of Cohorts: Retirement Saving and the Changing Assets of Older Americans
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 4600
PY  - 1993
Y2  - December 1993
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4600
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4600.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David A. Wise
Harvard Kennedy School
79 John F. Kennedy
Cambridge, MA   02138
E-Mail: dwise@nber.org

Steven F. Venti
Department of Economics
6106 Rockefeller Center
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH  03755
Tel: 603/646-2526
Fax: 603/646-2122
E-Mail: steven.f.venti@dartmouth.edu
AB  - Personal retirement accounts are becoming an increasingly important form of retirement saving.  Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the paper considers the effect of this change on the assets of recent retirees and persons who are approaching retirement.  Much of the analysis is based on comparison of younger and older cohorts with different lengths of exposure to personal retirement saving programs.  The findings suggest that personal retirement saving has already added substantially to the personal financial assets of older families.  Projections imply that the personal financial assets of the cohort that will attain age 76 in 28 years will be almost twice as large as the personal financial assets of the cohort that attained age 76 in 1991.  The results indicate also that to date there has been little replacement of employer-provided pension saving with personal retirement saving. Together with evidence that personal financial saving is unrelated to changes in home equity, the results suggest that personal retirement saving will lead to an important increase in the overall wealth of the elderly.
ER  -