Social Security Reform: Links to Saving, Investment, and Growth 
Conference Series 41
June 1997
Editors: Steven A. Sass and Robert K. Triest
Conference Papers | About the Participants | List of Attendees
Participants' Biographies
Edward D. Berkowitz is Chair of the Department of History and Professor of History at George Washington University. He has been a member of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Faculty in Health Care Finance at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, and he was a member of the Senior Staff of the President's Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties. Berkowitz has written numerous articles and several books on Social Security, including Mr. Social Security: The Life of Wilbur J. Cohen; America's Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan; and Social Security and Medicare: A Policy Primer (with Eric Kingson). He earned his B.A. in history from Princeton and his Ph.D. in history from Northwestern.
Henning Bohn is Professor of Economics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has taught at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and at Stanford Business School. Among his recent articles are "U.S. Equity Investments in Foreign Markets: Portfolio Rebalancing or Return Chasing?" (with Linda Tesar) inThe American Economic Review and "Balanced Budget Rules and Public Deficits: Evidence from the U.S. States" in the Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy. Bohn studied economics at the University of Mannheim, West Germany, and then received master's degrees in statistics and in economics and a Ph.D. in economics, all from Stanford University.
Barry P. Bosworth has been a Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution since 1979. His research has focused on issues of capital formation and saving behavior. Bosworth has published extensively, including the recent books Prospects for Saving and Investment in Industrial Countries and Can America Afford to Grow Old? (with H. Aaron and Gary Burtless). He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard University. He was Director of the President's Council on Wage and Price Stability from 1977 to 1979, and he also served as a Staff Economist with the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Bosworth received his B.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.
Lynn E. Browne is Senior Vice President and Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Her primary responsibilities are supporting the President of the Boston Fed in her participation in monetary policy deliberations and overseeing the Bank's scholarly research. Browne's own research in recent years has included studies on the role of services in the New England economy, discrimination in mortgage lending, and trends in saving and investment. Browne received her B.A. in economics from the University of Western Ontario and her Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T.
Gary Burtless is a Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He does research on issues of public finance, saving, labor markets, income distribution, social insurance, and government tax and transfer policy. He is the coauthor of numerous books, including Growth with Equity: Economic Policymaking for the Next Century. Burtless has consulted extensively on reforming social security policy and was a member of the Technical Panel on Trends and Issues in Retirement Savings for the 1994-1996 Advisory Council on Social Security. He now serves on the Panel on Privatization of Social Security of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Burtless graduated from Yale and earned his Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T.
Agustin G. Carstens is Director General of the Department of Economic Research at the Banco de Mexico. He has been affiliated with the Banco de Mexico for most of his professional career, serving from 1989 to 1993 as Treasurer in charge of the open-market operations unit, the foreign exchange division, and the management of international reserves. He has published a number of articles on privatization, foreign exchange markets, and other macroeconomic issues in Latin America. These include the recent "One Year of Solitude: Some Pilgrim's Tales about Mexico's 1994-1995 Crisis" in The American Economic Review. Carstens earned his B.A. from the Instituto Tecnologico de Mexico and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.
Marshall N. Carter is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the State Street Corporation. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Euroclear in Brussels and Co-Chairman of the U.S. Working Group of Thirty, which develops recommendations for revamping world securities clearance and settlement processes. Carter is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Board of Directors of the Boston Fed. He holds a B.S. in civil engineering from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, an M.S. in operations research and systems analysis from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and an M.A. from the School of Public and International Affairs at George Washington University. Before joining State Street, he was with Chase Manhattan Bank for 15 years.
Dora L. Costa is Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has written numerous articles on labor markets, pensions, health care, aging, and economic history, and the forthcoming book The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History 1880-1990. In 1994, Costa was awarded the Economic History Association's Allen Nevins Prize for outstanding dissertation research in U.S. economic history. Costa was Coordinator of Data Analysis for the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1993. She earned her B.A. in economics and mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.
Theresa J. Devine is a Principal Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office in Washington, D.C., where she is preparing a study assessing the potential effect of proposed reforms of Social Security on women, given the current situation of older women and the labor market activity of prime-age and younger women. She is coauthor (with Nicholas M. Kiefer) of the award-winning book Empirical Labor Economics: The Search Approach. She has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1995-1996 was a Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. Devine earned a B.A. in English and economics from Boston College, an M.A. in economics from Indiana University, and a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University.
Peter A. Diamond is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His most recent articles on social insurance include "Proposals to Restructure Social Security" in the Journal of Economic Perspectives and "Generational Accounts and Generational Balance: An Assessment" in the National Tax Journal. Currently, Diamond is Chair of the Board of the National Academy of Social Insurance, of which he is also a founding member, and Co-Chair of the Academy's Panel on Privatization of Social Security. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. Diamond received his B.A. in mathematics from Yale and his Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T.
Richard Disney is Professor of Economics at Queen Mary & Westfield College at the University of London. Previously, he was Professor of Economics at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Disney has written numerous academic articles and two books on social security, pensions, and labor market issues. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the OECD, and the U.K. Treasury and Department of Social Security on projects concerning retirement saving, pension reform, and the consequences of employment restructuring for pension scheme viability. Disney is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. He was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Sussex.
Malcolm L. Edey is Head of the Economic Analysis Department at the Reserve Bank of Australia. His recent articles include "An Assessment of Financial Reform in OECD Countries" (with K. Hviding) and "Australia's Retirement Income System: Implications for Saving and Capital Markets" (with J. Simon). Edey has spent most of his career at the Reserve Bank, with three years at the Money and Finance Division of the OECD in Paris. He is the editor of The Future of the Financial System, the Bank's 1996 annual conference volume, and has been a Guest Lecturer at the University of Sydney. Edey received his B.Ec. from the University of Sydney and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the London School of Economics.
Eric M. Engen is a Senior Economist in the Fiscal Analysis Section at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Before joining the Board staff, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California at Los Angeles. Engen received the National Tax Association's Doctoral Dissertation Award in Government Finance and Taxation in 1992. His most recent articles are "Fundamental Tax Reform: The Importance of Uncertainty" (with William Gale) in The American Economic Review, and "The Illusory Effects of Saving Incentives on Saving" (with William Gale and John Karl Scholz) in theJournal of Economic Perspectives. He received his B.S. in natural resource economics from the University of Maryland at College Park and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia.
William Gale is a Senior Fellow and the Joseph A. Pechman Fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on tax policy, saving behavior, and pensions. Before joining Brookings, Gale was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California at Los Angeles and a senior staff economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Gale is the coeditor (with Henry Aaron) of Economic Effects of Fundamental Tax Reform. He has published in a variety of academic journals as well as in the popular press. He received his B.A. in economics from Duke University and his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. He also studied for a year at the London School of Economics.
Edward M. Gramlich is Dean of the School of Public Policy and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He has written several books and many articles on budget policy, income redistribution, Social Security, and fiscal federalism. Gramlich also has extensive governmental experience and is now working on a book about Social Security reform. From 1994 to 1996 he was Chair of the Advisory Council on Social Security. He was Deputy and Acting Director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1986 to 1987, and he has also served with the Federal Reserve Board, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and the Brookings Institution. Gramlich was an undergraduate at Williams College and earned his Ph.D. at Yale University.
Charles Y. Horioka is Professor of Economics at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Osaka University. He has also taught at Kyoto University and at Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia Universities. Horioka is a Research Associate at NBER and at the Center for Japan-U.S. Business and Economic Studies at the Stern School of Business at New York University. He has published numerous articles and several books on saving in Japan, including most recently Saving and Bequests in an Aging Society (in Japanese) with Noriyuki Takayama and Kiyoshi Ohta, and the forthcoming Household Saving in Japan: The Importance of Saving for Specific Motives. He earned his B.A. in economics and his Ph.D. in business economics from Harvard.
Estelle James is Lead Economist in the Policy Research Department at the World Bank. She is principal author of Averting the Old Age Crisis: Policies to Protect the Old and Promote Growth, the first global analysis of economic problems associated with population aging. Before joining the World Bank she was Professor of Economics, Chair of the Economics Department, and Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. James writes on public finance and human resources topics, including the economics of education, nonprofit organizations, and old-age security, and she has received many fellowships and research grants for her work. James earned her B.S. from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T.
Laurence J. Kotlikoff is Professor of Economics at Boston University. He has also taught at the University of California at Los Angeles and Yale University, and he has served as a Senior Economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers. He has been a consultant to a variety of organizations including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the OECD. He is the author of Generational Accounting and What Determines Saving? and coauthor (with David Wise) of The Wage Carrot and the Pension Stick: Retirement Benefits and Labor Force Participation. He has published numerous articles on budget deficits, generational accounting, Social Security, and saving. Kotlikoff received his B.A. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
Charles Lieberman is Managing Director and Chief Economist of Chase Securities, Inc. His responsibilities include economic research, interest rate and exchange rate forecasting, and domestic and global market strategy for the capital markets activities and corporate relationships of the Chase Manhattan Bank. He sits on the Bank's Markets Committee, which is responsible for bank funding and interest rate risk exposure. Lieberman has also been an economist at Manufacturers Hanover, Shearson Lehman Brothers, and Morgan Stanley and served as head of the Monetary Analysis staff of the New York Fed. He earned his undergraduate degree in economics at M.I.T. and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Diane J. Macunovich is Associate Professor of Economics at Williams College, where she specializes in demographic economics and in labor economics. She recently participated in the work of the Advisory Council on Social Security, serving on the Technical Panel on Trends and Issues in Retirement Savings and the Technical Panel on Assumptions and Methods. From 1987 through 1993, Macunovich was a Research Associate at the Rand Corporation. Her recent study, "Social Security and Retirees: Two Views of the Projections An Economist's Perspective," appears in Social Security: What Role for the Future? a publication of the National Academy of Social Insurance. She earned her B.Sc. from M.I.T. and her M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Southern California.
Cathy E. Minehan is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. As one of the nation's central bankers, she contributes to policy decisions that promote the safety and soundness of the U.S. financial system and the health of the nation's economy. She is an expert in payment systems, a major Fed responsibility. She also focuses her energies on areas of structural economic development within New England, including community development, public education, and training. She serves on the boards of many civic, professional, and educational organizations, including the Boston Private Industry Council, Jobs for Massachusetts, United Way, the University of Rochester, and Bentley College. Minehan began her career with the Federal Reserve System following graduation from the University of Rochester. She received an M.B.A. from New York University and holds several honorary degrees.
Alicia H. Munnell is a Member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Prior to joining the Council, she served for nearly three years as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. Munnell has spent most of her professional career at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She joined its Research Department as an economist in 1973 and became Senior Vice President and Director of Research in 1984. She has written extensively on tax policy, Social Security, public and private pensions, and productivity. She is a cofounder and was the first President of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Munnell earned her B.A. from Wellesley College, her M.A. from Boston University, and her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
James M. Poterba is the Mitsui Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is Director of the Public Economics Research Program at NBER and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society. Poterba's recent work has emphasized the effect of taxation on the financial behavior of households and firms and the impact of tax-deferred retirement saving on other aspects of private saving. He has edited two books comparing saving behavior in industrial nations, Public Policies and Household Saving and International Comparisons of Household Saving. Poterba was an undergraduate at Harvard College and received his D.Phil. in economics from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar.
John P. Rust is Professor of Economics at Yale University. He has also been Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin, as well as Visiting Professor at the University of Oslo and Visiting Lecturer at the Tinbergen Institute in Rotterdam and the University of Western Ontario. Rust is a member of the Panel on Retirement Income for the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences. He has published two books and numerous articles, including "How Social Security and Medicare Affect Retirement Behavior in a World with Incomplete Markets" (with Chris Phelan), forthcoming in Econometrica. He received his B.A. in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T.
Andrew A. Samwick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Dartmouth College. Samwick is the Principal Investigator for a research grant from the National Institute on Aging of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for a study on "The Effects of Pensions and Social Security on Retirement and Saving." He is also the author of several articles on Social Security and on saving, including "The Transition Path in Privatizing Social Security" (with Martin Feldstein), forthcoming in Martin Feldstein, ed., Privatizing Social Security, and "The Nature of Precautionary Wealth" (with Christopher Carroll), forthcoming in the Journal of Monetary Economics. Samwick earned his B.A. in economics from Harvard College and his Ph.D. from M.I.T.
Steven A. Sass is an Editor and Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His most recent book, The Promise of Private Pensions, is forthcoming this year from Harvard University Press. Sass has written numerous articles in the Bank's quarterly, The Regional Review, of which he is the editor. These have included "Public Pensions Dos and Don'ts,""Passing the Buck: The Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth," and "Risk at the PBGC: The Public Guarantee of Private Pension Benefits." Sass has taught at Rutgers University and Bentley College, and from 1979 to 1982 he was an Assistant Research Professor at the Wharton School and a Research Associate of the Pension Research Council. He earned his B.A. from the University of Delaware and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
C. Eugene Steuerle is Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute and author of a weekly column "Economic Perspective" for Tax Notes magazine. At the Institute, he has conducted extensive research on budget and tax policy, social security, health care, and welfare reform. His most recent book, Retooling Social Security for the Twenty-First Century, was written with Jon Bakija. Steuerle was Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for Tax Analysis and Economic Coordinator of the Treasury's 1984-86 tax reform effort. He served as a member of the Technical Panel on Assumptions and Methods for the Social Security Advisory Council and advisor to the National Commission on Retirement Policy. Steuerle was an undergraduate at the University of Dayton and received master's degrees and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.
Robert K. Triest is an Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He has taught at Johns Hopkins University and at the University of California at Davis, where he was an Associate Professor. His research has focused primarily on public finance and labor economics. Recent publications include "Fundamental Tax Reform and Labor Supply" in the book Economic Effects of Fundamental Tax Reform; "Technology Diffusion in U.S. Manufacturing: The Geographic Dimension" (with Jane S. Little) in Technology and Growth, Conference Series No. 40 of the Boston Fed; and "Regional Differences in Family Poverty," in theNew England Economic Review. Triest received his B.A. from Vassar College and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Mark J. Warshawsky is Manager of Pension and Economic Research for TIAA-CREF, the pension system for workers in U.S. institutions of higher education, where he conducts research on the economic and public policy environments for pension and insurance products. He also manages TIAA-CREF's small grant and Paul A. Samuelson Award programs. Prior to joining TIAA-CREF in 1995, he supervised a study of underfunded defined benefit plans for the Employee Plans Division of the Internal Revenue Service and was a Senior Economist in the Capital Markets Section of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board. Warshawsky earned his B.A. from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Stephen P. Zeldes is the Benjamin Rosen Professor of Economics and Finance at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. Prior to this, he was a professor in the Finance Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Zeldes served as a member of the Technical Panel on Trends and Issues in Retirement Saving of the Advisory Council on Social Security, and he is a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance Panel on Social Security Privatization. His research has examined a wide range of applied macroeconomic issues including the determinants of household saving and portfolio choice, the effects of government budget deficits, and the relationship between consumer spending and the stock market. Zeldes did his undergraduate work at Brown University and received his Ph.D. from M.I.T.