Baby boomer retirement security

摘要

Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia Mitchell have written a stimulating paper on an important topic. The paper is in two parts. The first part presents some new data from the latest wave of the Health and Retirement Survey in order to gain some sense of how prepared the early baby boomers (those both between 1948 and 1953) are for retirement. The second uses this data to analyze of the role of planning and financial literacy in wealth accumulation. I will quickly discuss the highlights of the first part and spend some more time discussing the second part. The distribution of wealth among the early baby boomers is qualitatively similar to that of other cohorts. The wealth distribution is skewed. High income and highly educated boomers are wealthier. Single, Black, or Hispanic boomers are less wealthy. The massive heterogeneity in within any classification, however, dwarfs any differences across categories.