An Examination of Empirical Tests of Social Security and Savings
An Examination of Empirical Tests of Social Security and Savings
复制标题
对社会保障和储蓄的实证检验的考察
DOI：
10.3386/w0730
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发表时间：
1981
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
L. Kotlikoff
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
A. Auerbach;L. Kotlikoff
社会保障和其他形式的政府债务对国民储蓄的影响是当今经济学中争论最广泛的政策问题之一。一些估计表明，社会保障已使美国储蓄减少了近百分之四十。本文研究了最近对社会保障储蓄问题的横截面和时间序列实证检验，并认为，鉴于当前数据，这两种类型的检验都没有太大潜力解决争议。特别是，存在许多与社会保障时间序列回归相关的规范问题，这些问题很容易导致系数高度不稳定，并导致拒绝社会保障减少储蓄的假设，即使它实际上是正确的。这些观点通过对作者之前开发的完美预见生命周期增长模型生成的假设数据进行回归来证明。虽然数据是从社会保障使国家资本存量减少近百分之二十的模型中获得的，但时间序列社会保障回归系数差异很大，具体取决于计划的具体水平、假设家庭的偏好、相伴随的政府政策水平和数据的时间间隔。
The effect of social security and other forms of government debt on national savings is one of the most widely debated policy questions in economics today. Some estimates suggest that social security has reduced U.S. savings by almost forty percent. This paper examines recent cross-section and time series empirical tests of the social security-savings question and argues that, given current data, neither type of test has much potential for settling the controversy. In particular, there are a number of specification problems relating to social security time series regressions that can easily lead to highly unstable coefficients and to rejection of the hypothesis that social security reduces savings, even if it is actually true. These points are demonstrated by running regressions on hypothetical data generated by a perfect foresight life-cycle growth model developed previously by the authors. While the data is obtained from a model in which social security reduces the nation's capital stock by almost twenty percent, time series social security regression coefficients vary enormously depending on the specified level of the program, the preferences of hypothetical households, the level of concommitant government policies, and the time interval of the data.