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Social Security, Preretirement Labor Supply, and Saving: A Confirmation and a Critique

In an earlier article in theJournal of Political Economy (Burkhauser and Turner 1978), we used time-series data to test the net empirical importance of the substitution and wealth effects of social security on the market work of prime-age men. We found that hours worked per week would have fallen by 2-3 hours without the present social security system. A recent paper by Leimer and Lesnoy (this issue) has shown that the Feldstein (1974) social security wealth variable, which we used in our regressions, was calculated incorrectly. In the light of this finding, we have reestimated our original regressions using the Leimer-Lesnoy corrected social security wealth variables. Our primary regression in table 1 (col. 1), which uses the entire sample period, confirms our original results. Again we find that the work week is 2-3 hours higher than it would have been in the absence of social security, a result empirically significant by conventional standards. Leimer and Lesnoy have made an important contribution to research on social security by correcting a calculation error. Our empirical results, however, raise a fundamental question not discussed in our original paper which requires a reexamination of the empirical methodology found in Feldstein (1974), Leimer and Lesnoy (this issue), and other papers. The facile assumption that the effect of social security on saving can be directly determined from a consumer-expenditure function we show leads to an overstatement of social security's negative effect on saving.