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Publications by Elizabeth Bell for Retirement Policy

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More about Elizabeth Bell's areas of expertise can be found on this Urban Institute expert's page.

Widening access to retirement savings vehicles and increasing the accumulations within these vehicles could help secure the future for many lower-income families. Currently, the role played by private pensions in asset building is small to nonexistent for most poor and lower-middle class workers. Instead, these persons rely primarily on Social Security and the savings in their home equity, if any, to sustain them in retirement. This brief, based on feedback from a roundtable of experts convened at the Urban Institute, provides background data on the assets of US households and discusses options for increasing levels of saving and retirement security for low- and moderate-income families.

To encourage saving for retirement, private pensions such as employer sponsored 401(k) plans or IRAs receive favorable tax treatment by the federal government. A major goal of such tax provisions is to increase personal saving. A measure of the value of these tax benefits is provided by the Treasury Department, and the National Income and Product Accounts contains a measure of personal saving. With the sudden drop in personal savings in 1999 and its steady decline in more recent recession years, government tax expenditures on pension benefits began to approach the personal savings level by the end of the 1990s.

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