Pensions and household wealth accumulation

Abstract

Economists have long suggested that higher private pension benefits "crowd out" other sources of household wealth accumulation. We exploit detailed information on pensions and lifetime earnings for older workers in the 1992 wave of the Health and Retirement Study and employ an instrumental-variable (IV) identification strategy to estimate crowd-out. The IV estimates suggest statistically significant crowd-out: each dollar of pension wealth is associated with a 53-67 cent decline in nonpension wealth. With less precision, we use an instrumental-variable quantile regression estimator and find that most of the effect is concentrated in the upper quantiles of the wealth distribution. © 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.