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Publications by Melissa Favreault for Retirement Policy

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

Growing fiscal pressures and increasing life expectancy have prompted calls to raise retirement ages. Some fear this change might harm long-career, lower-wage workers. Tying retirement benefit eligibility to years of service might protect low-wage workers who start their careers early. But higher disability rates and greater employment volatility could offset lower-wage workers’ early labor force starts. Using survey data matched to administrative records, we describe how work histories vary by gender, education, and other characteristics. We find that years of service are not likely to effectively protect the lowest-wage workers, as those with the least education also work the least.

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.

Social Security spouse and survivor benefits advantage single-earner families relative to dual-earner families paying the same total taxes. Our paper considers earnings sharing—through which husbands' and wives' earnings records are combined and averaged throughout their marriage when computing benefits—as well as other changes to spouse/survivor benefits, including caregiver credits and minimum benefits. All the roughly cost-equivalent packages examined improve adequacy and horizontal equity compared to current law. The earnings-sharing proposal, however, only reduced poverty with significant adjustments to the treatment of surviving spouses. The packages reveal tradeoffs among beneficiary groups, with particular tensions around work and marital status.

Although Social Security does not currently guarantee low-wage workers a minimum retirement benefit, several proposed reforms include benefit minimums. Our analysis suggests that such policies could help reduce poverty among older adults. However, the way the minimums are designed could affect the extent to which poverty rates decline. Using the Urban Institute's dynamic microsimulation model, we examine five alternative benefit options. Several lessons emerge from these simulations that could help guide designers of Social Security proposals. Understanding how a well-designed minimum benefit could reduce poverty is especially important now, when the program's long-term fiscal deficit threatens future benefit reductions.

Despite Social Security's success at bolstering retirement security, many older Americans remain mired in poverty. Because Social Security does not guarantee a minimum benefit, many long-service, low-wage workers receive benefits that leave them below the poverty line. African Americans, Hispanics, and unmarried women are especially vulnerable. Although productivity gains are likely to reduce old-age poverty over time, Social Security's long-term financing problem makes future benefit cuts likely. This analysis explores two potential minimum-benefit designs and shows that an effective minimum benefit could help protect the highest-risk groups.

Melissa Favreault, a senior research associate at the UI's Income and Benefits Policy Center, explores ways that Social Security might reduce poverty among the vulnerable elderly without passing on the costs to our children and grandchildren.

In light of Social Security reform proposals that include provisions for minimum benefits, this paper considers the redistributive purpose of Social Security and whether a minimum benefit may reduce need among aged and disabled people more equitably or efficiently than current law structures. We then examine several minimum benefit designs. We find that minimum benefits could help reduce poverty among the aged substantially, even in the context of benefit reductions to improve the program's long-term fiscal deficit. However, trade-offs exist; generous minimums could reduce Social Security’s earnings relationship, which has helped the program garner strong political support.

Unlike most analyses of Social Security reforms, this paper explicitly considers interactions with the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. Using a microsimulation model, we examine reducing Social Security benefits by the percentage required to approach 75-year solvency. We then add options for attenuating the effects on low-income beneficiaries. In the simulated reforms, we compare benefit receipt patterns, poverty rates, and winners and losers in 2022. Substantial reforms are necessary for SSI to play a more effective income security role. Among the limited set of reforms we consider, Social Security minimum benefit plans would more effectively reduce poverty among low-income beneficiaries.

Employment rates for single mothers with dependent children have been rising, partly because of welfare reform and expansions in the Earned Income Tax Credit. This paper examines this trend and implications for future retirement security. The results show that employment and earnings gains for single mothers during the late 1990s will translate into modestly higher Social Security benefits and better retirement outcomes when they reach later life, assuming these trends persist. However, most single mothers will fare worse in retirement than other women, primarily because they generally earned low wages over their lifetimes and many lack financial support from spouses.

Social Security keeps millions of American women out of poverty in old age, but many low-income unmarried women remain at risk. Renewed attention to Social Security's long-term deficit offers an opportunity for reform to recognize women's changing roles without creating inequities, discouraging work, or harming the most vulnerable. This brief discusses features of Social Security that have greater ramifications for women and considers proposals to make benefit distribution more equitable to women. Since women have diverse work and family experiences, any reform is likely to have disparate effects. We highlight differences among groups of women while recognizing diversity within them.

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