CRAIG COPELAND, Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI)
Email: COPELAND@EBRI.ORG

This paper closely examines the level of participation by workers in public- and private-sector employment-based pension or retirement plans, based on the U.S. Census Bureau's March 2008 Current Population Survey (CPS), the most recent data currently available. Among full-time, full-year wage and salary workers ages 21-64 (those with the strongest connection to the work force), just over 63 percent worked for an employer or union that sponsors a retirement plan, and 55 percent participated in a plan. The paper begins with an overview of retirement plan types and participation in these types of plans. Next, it describes the data used in this study, along with their relative strengths and weaknesses. From these data, results on participation in employment-based retirement plans are analyzed for 2007 across various worker characteristics and those of their employers. The paper then explores retirement plan participation across U.S. geographic regions, including a state-by-state comparison and a comparison of certain consolidated statistical areas (CSAs). In addition to the results for 2007, trends from 1987-2007 in employment-based retirement plan participation are presented across many of the same worker and employer characteristics as used for 2007. The paper concludes with a discussion of this study's findings.

SARMISTHA PAL, Brunel University - Economics and Finance, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Email: sarmistha.pal@brunel.ac.uk
SUGATA GHOSH, Brunel University - Economics and Finance
Email: Sugata.Ghosh@brunel.ac.uk

In the context of strikingly low literacy rates among Indian women and low caste population, the paper explores whether and how far the interests of the marginalized poor are undermined by the dominant elite consisting mainly of the landed and the capitalists. We distinguish the dominant elite from the minority elite (i.e., elected women and low caste representatives in the ruling government) and also the marginalised as measured by the state poverty rate. Results based on the Indian state-level data suggest that a higher share of land held by the top 5% of the population lowers public spending on education while presence of capitalist elite, as reflected in greater degree of industrialisation enhances it, even in poorer states; the landed elite thus appears to be unresponsive to the underlying poverty rate. The effect of minority representation in the government appears to have a limited impact, indicating a possibility of their non-accountability to serve their cohorts and/or a possible alliance with the dominant elite.

ELGIE MCFAYDEN, Kentucky State University
Email: elgie.mcfayden@kysu.edu

During the 1990's, the United States economy underwent a period of unprecedented growth and expansion. Many of the key economic indicators used by the Federal Reserve Board to evaluate the United States economy performed well. During the same time period (1993-2000), President Bill Clinton and the United States Congress implemented various policies and programs under the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) designed to significantly reduce poverty. The Clinton Administration acknowledged it might take up to ten years for these policies and programs to significantly alter the structural and systemic factors which contribute to and cause poverty. These policies and programs have been in place for more than a decade and it is important that researchers, policy analysts and policy makers begin a systematic, comprehensive and objective evaluation to determine the long-term impact on poor Americans. The primary goal of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of federal poverty reduction policies and programs implemented during the 1990's affects the current social and economic predicament of poor Americans.

AKIO MATSUMOTO, affiliation not provided to SSRN

Since a finite time delay in government purchases of goods and service cannot be ignored, this paper studies how such a time lag in a fiscal policy affects the stability of the income adjustment process. Formulating the income adjustment process with time delay, it adopts two different approaches: one is a fixed time lag and the other is a continuously distributed lag. It is demonstrated that the continuously distributed time lag has the stronger destabilizing effect if the adjustment of the government expenditure is slow while the fixed lag has the stronger destabilizing effect if this adjustment is rapid.

RAJ CHETTY, University of California, Berkeley - Department of Economics, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Email: chetty@econ.berkeley.edu

The debate between structural and reduced-form approaches has generated substantial controversy in applied economics. This article reviews a recent literature in public economics that combines the advantages of reduced-form strategies - transparent and credible identification - with an important advantage of structural models - the ability to make predictions about counterfactual outcomes and welfare. This recent work has developed formulas for the welfare consequences of various policies that are functions of high-level elasticities rather than deep primitives. These formulas provide theoretical guidance for the measurement of treatment effects using program evaluation methods. I present a general framework that shows how many policy questions can be answered by identifying a small set of sufficient statistics. I use this framework to synthesize the modern literature on taxation, social insurance, and behavioral welfare economics. Finally, I discuss topics in labor economics, industrial organization, and macroeconomics that can be tackled using the sufficient statistic approach.