Since the early 1970s, Urban Institute staff have been developing comprehensive models to project future retirement incomes. Incorporating the latest data on demographics, labor supply, income, and wealth, these tools are used by researchers at the Social Security Administration and by us to evaluate different Social Security reform proposals.

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Modeling Income in the Near Term 5 (Research Report)
Author(s): Karen E. Smith, Melissa Favreault, Caroline Ratcliffe, Barbara Butrica, Eric Toder, Jon M. Bakija

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.

Posted: November 19, 2007

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Modeling Income in the Near Term 4 (Research Report)
Author(s): Karen E. Smith, David Cashin, Melissa Favreault

This final report presents the retirement income projections from Modeling Income in the Near Term (MINT4) data system. Key findings include that the 1996 SIPP panel has lower-than-average lifetime earnings compared with the 1990 to 1993 SIPP panels, but the variance is within the bounds of the sampling error. Retirement income will become increasingly unequally distributed as both the top of the distribution rises and bottom falls. Aged poverty rates decline as retirement income grows faster than prices through years of positive real wage growth.

Posted: April 19, 2005

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A Primer on the Dynamic Simulation of Income Model (DYNASIM3) (Discussion Papers)
Author(s): Melissa Favreault, Karen E. Smith

This primer provides an overview of the Urban Institute's Dynamic Simulation of Income Model (DYNASIM3). DYNASIM3 is a dynamic microsimulation model that projects the population and analyzes the long-run distributional consequences of retirement and aging issues. The model starts with a representative sample of individuals and families and ages the data year by year, simulating demographic and economic events including all of the key components of retirement incomes. The model has been used recently to examine the long-term consequences of recent patterns of savings and earnings inequality and to simulate potential changes in Social Security benefits.

Posted: February 01, 2004

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Modeling Income in the Near Term: Revised Projections of Retirement Income Through 2020 for the 1931-1960 Birth Cohorts (Research Report)
Author(s): Eric Toder, Lawrence H. Thompson, Melissa Favreault, Richard W. Johnson, Kevin Perese, Caroline Ratcliffe, Karen E. Smith, Cori E. Uccello, Timothy Waidmann, Jillian Berk, Romina Woldemariam, Gary T. Burtless, Claudia Sahm, Douglas A. Wolf

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.

Posted: June 01, 2002

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Long Term Model Development for Social Security Policy Analysis (Research Report)
Author(s): Eric Toder, Melissa Favreault, John O'Hare, Diane Lim Rogers, Frank Sammartino, Karen E. Smith, Kent Smetters, John Rust

Policymakers need to understand how Social Security reforms affect income distribution. Existing models range from simple representations of career earnings of typical workers to complex general equilibrium models. Population micro-simulation models, which project the earnings, wealth, and demographic histories of a representative sample of families, are useful for simulating many reform proposals. This report evaluates one such model - the projected cohorts model - and then discusses in detail three important issues in model development: 1) representing saving behavior, 2) capturing macro-economic effects, and 3) accounting for risk and uncertainty.

Posted: January 01, 2000

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