Book Description

This study is the third in a series of studies that use comprehensive Social Security administrative data on past earnings and benefits by year, age, gender, and race to analyze historical redistribution across those characteristics under the Social Security program. It examines historical lifetime redistribution to date across and within cohorts born through 1927, combining and extending the results of the previous two studies, for which less historical data were available. Redistributional estimates incorporating the additional data confirm the results of the earlier studies relative lifetime redistributional outcomes to data under the DI program have generally been much more favorable for "Other Races" than for "Whites;" have generally been more favorable for females than for males in most, but not all, of the cohorts considered; and accumulated benefits have generally exceeded accumulated taxes by substantial margins for all but the earliest birth cohort groups. In contrast to outcomes under the OASI program, accumulated net transfers to date for very early birth cohorts have generally been negative under the DI program taken by itself, although the size of these negative net transfers is relatively small.