RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Pensions and Household Wealth Accumulation
JF Journal of Human Resources
JO J Hum Resour
FD University of Wisconsin Press
SP 203
OP 236
DO 10.3368/jhr.46.1.203
VO 46
IS 1
A1 Gary V. Engelhardt
A1 Anil Kumar
YR 2011
UL http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/46/1/203.abstract
AB 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.