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  Working Paper No. 420

  Is the Equalizing Effect of Retirement Wealth Wearing Off?

  Retirement wealth is often viewed as a great equalizer, offsetting the inequality in standard household net worth. One of the most dramatic changes in the retirement income system over the last two decades has been a decline in traditional Defined Benefit (DB) pension plans and a sharp rise in Defined Contribution (DC) pensions. Using data […]
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  Working Paper No. 419

  FDIC-sponsored Self-Insured Depositors

  Insured depositors have no reason to care how their banks perform or how safe they are.  Only uninsured depositors have that incentive.  This paper offers a plan to replace some insured deposits with uninsured deposits.  The plan: the FDIC would guarantee loan contracts if the loan takers deposited the proceeds exclusively in uninsured deposits and […]
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  Research Project Report

  Economic Well-Being in US Regions and the Red and Blue States

  This report analyzes regional aspects of economic well-being according to four regions identified by the United States Census Bureau: the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. Using the official measures and the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW), the authors examine how the average American household fared from 1989 to 2001 and discuss disparities in […]
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  Strategic Analysis

  How Fragile Is the US Economy?

  As we projected in a previous Strategic Analysis, the United States’ economy experienced growth rates higher than 4 percent in 2004. The question we want to raise in this Strategic Analysis is whether these rates will persist or come back down. We believe that several signs point in the latter direction. In what follows, we […]
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  Working Paper No. 418

  Asset Ownership along Gender Lines

  Gender differences have long been documented in earnings, employment opportunities, and time spent within the unpaid care economy. This paper joins the recent efforts in the economics literature on gender differences in asset ownership. Specifically, it investigates whether a gender-specific composition in asset ownership between heads of households and spouses can be detected among low-income, […]
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  Press Release

  Bush Social Security Warnings Unfounded, Says New Report from Levy Economics Institute

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  Policy Notes No. 2

  Manufacturing a Crisis

  For seven decades, the far right has never veered from its avowed mission to gut America’s most comprehensive, successful, and popular safety net: Social Security. While it had won a few small battles (most notably, the Greenspan Commission’s huge 1983 payroll tax hikes and two-year increase in the normal retirement age), its efforts never gained […]
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  Working Paper No. 417

  Determinants of Minority–White Differentials in Child Poverty

  This paper uses data from the 1993–2001 March Current Population Survey to estimate the extent to which child living arrangements, parental work patterns, and immigration attributes shape racial and ethnic variation in child poverty. Results from multivariate analyses and a standardization technique reveal that parental work patterns as well as child living arrangements are especially […]
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  Working Paper No. 416

  Occupational and Industrial Mobility in the United States 1969–93

  Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we investigate occupational and industrial mobility of individuals over the 1969–80 and 1981–93 periods in the United States. We find that workers changed both occupations and industries more frequently in the later period. For example, occupational mobility for men ranged from 15 to 20 percent per year during […]
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  Summary No. 1

  Summary Winter 2005

  A conference on the distributional effects of government spending and taxation was held at the Levy Institute’s conference center in fall 2004 and is summarized under The Distribution of Income and Wealth program. The presentations outlined how governments play a large role in affecting inequality, since countries spend at least a quarter of GDP on […]
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  Policy Notes No. 1

  The Case for an Environmentally Sustainable Jobs Program

  The job numbers in the United States and around the globe continue to look bleak. Not only are the absolute numbers dismal, but also job growth has dragged on with no hope for a substantial change in prospects. This situation supports the view that we are facing a long-term problem that requires critical and creative […]
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  Report No. 1

  Report January 2005

  The Levy Institute’s October 2004 conference on the distributional effects of government spending and taxation addressed topics ranging from the social benefits of various types of economic development to the economic fortunes of future retirees, and included keynote speaker David Cay Johnston’s stinging indictment of the distributional properties of the American tax system. A synopsis […]