17 research outputs found
Are There Opportunities to Increase Social Security Progressivity Despite Underfunding?
Reviews the payroll tax, Social Security's benefit formula, and outcomes by race, gender, and earnings level, and explores why low-income and minority groups do not receive greater returns on contributions. Simulates the effects of progressive reforms
The Impact of Late-Career Health and Employment Shocks on Social Security and Other Wealth
About one-quarter of workers age 51 to 55 in 1992 developed health-related work limitations and about one-fifth were laid off from their jobs before age 62. Although late-career health and employment shocks often derail retirement savings plans, Social Security's disability insurance, spouse and survivor benefits, and progressive benefit formula provide important protections. In fact, health shocks increase Social Security's lifetime value, primarily because the system's disability insurance allows some disabled workers to collect benefits before age 62. However, if the system's disability insurance program did not exist, the onset of health-related work limitations would substantially reduce Social Security wealth
Diversity in Retirement Wealth Accumulation
Examines household wealth by source, such as Social Security, home equity, savings, and defined benefit pensions; how their savings build up with age; and how total wealth accumulations vary by income, education, and race/ethnicity. Explores implications
Will Employers Want Aging Boomers?
Explores the status quo of older workers; why baby boomers are likely to work longer; and how changes in needed skills, the characteristics of older workers, and labor force growth will affect demand for older workers. Includes policy recommendations
Pairing fluctuations and pseudogaps in the attractive Hubbard model
The two-dimensional attractive Hubbard model is studied in the weak to
intermediate coupling regime by employing a non-perturbative approach. It is
first shown that this approach is in quantitative agreement with Monte Carlo
calculations for both single-particle and two-particle quantities. Both the
density of states and the single-particle spectral weight show a pseudogap at
the Fermi energy below some characteristic temperature T*, also in good
agreement with quantum Monte Carlo calculations. The pseudogap is caused by
critical pairing fluctuations in the low-temperature renormalized classical
regime of the two-dimensional system. With increasing temperature
the spectral weight fills in the pseudogap instead of closing it and the
pseudogap appears earlier in the density of states than in the spectral
function. Small temperature changes around T* can modify the spectral weight
over frequency scales much larger than temperature. Several qualitative results
for the s-wave case should remain true for d-wave superconductors.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figure
A Solvable Regime of Disorder and Interactions in Ballistic Nanostructures, Part I: Consequences for Coulomb Blockade
We provide a framework for analyzing the problem of interacting electrons in
a ballistic quantum dot with chaotic boundary conditions within an energy
(the Thouless energy) of the Fermi energy. Within this window we show that the
interactions can be characterized by Landau Fermi liquid parameters. When ,
the dimensionless conductance of the dot, is large, we find that the disordered
interacting problem can be solved in a saddle-point approximation which becomes
exact as (as in a large-N theory). The infinite theory shows a
transition to a strong-coupling phase characterized by the same order parameter
as in the Pomeranchuk transition in clean systems (a spontaneous
interaction-induced Fermi surface distortion), but smeared and pinned by
disorder. At finite , the two phases and critical point evolve into three
regimes in the plane -- weak- and strong-coupling regimes separated
by crossover lines from a quantum-critical regime controlled by the quantum
critical point. In the strong-coupling and quantum-critical regions, the
quasiparticle acquires a width of the same order as the level spacing
within a few 's of the Fermi energy due to coupling to collective
excitations. In the strong coupling regime if is odd, the dot will (if
isolated) cross over from the orthogonal to unitary ensemble for an
exponentially small external flux, or will (if strongly coupled to leads) break
time-reversal symmetry spontaneously.Comment: 33 pages, 14 figures. Very minor changes. We have clarified that we
are treating charge-channel instabilities in spinful systems, leaving
spin-channel instabilities for future work. No substantive results are
change