Research by Author & Topic

Publications by Caroline Ratcliffe on Elderly

This report describes the work the Urban Institute performed to generate the Model of Income in the Near Term, Version 5 (MINT5). MINT is a tool developed for The Division of Policy Evaluation (DPE) of the Social Security Administration (SSA) to analyze the distributional consequences of Social Security reform proposals. MINT is a micro-level data file of individuals born between 1926 and 2018. It starts with a rich set of income and demographic characteristics from the 1990 to 1996 Survey of Income and Program Particpation (SIPP) data linked to SSA data on earnings and benefits. MINT then projects these characteristics until death or the year 2099.

This report details the development of a third version of MINT (Modeling Income in the Near Term), a tool for simulating the retirement incomes of members of the Baby Boom and neighboring cohorts. MINT3 can produce projections of economic and demographic characteristics in the year 2020, at the time of retirement, and for other years and ages. It can be used both to construct a baseline using alternative economic and demographic assumptions and to analyze the distributional consequences of a variety of Social Security policy changes.

The Division of Policy Evaluation (DPE) at the Social Security Administration (SSA) is developing a model to evaluate the distributional effects of Social Security policy changes. The model is referred to as Modeling Income in the Near Term, or MINT. This technical report describes the results of development work on the MINT model performed under contract to SSA by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. The report discusses the methods used to project future incomes, presents regression results for equations explaining the path of different sources of income, and displays tables that summarize the results of projections. It discusses how income in retirement is projected to change for younger cohorts, relative to birth cohorts retiring in the 1990s, and discusses the sources of projected changes in the distribution of income of retirees.