id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-299245-qirh1vud	Catherine, Sylvain	Relaxing household liquidity constraints through social security()	2020-08-10		.txt	text/plain	6170	345	56	Recent proposals suggest giving workers early access to a small portion of their future Social Security benefits to finance their consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic. We compute expected benefits by simulating workers' earnings trajectories and then discount these benefits, accounting for the long-run correlation between Social Security and stock market returns. As Fig. 1 illustrates, Social Security benefits are relatively evenly distributed across the wealth distribution, whereas the value of retirement accounts and liquid savings is concentrated in the top decile. We use this measure to evaluate the efficiency of an early distribution of 1% of Social Security benefits and compare this policy to already enacted alternatives: allowing workers to tap retirement accounts without penalty, $1200 stimulus checks, and the extension of unemployment insurance by $600 per week. The goal of this paper is to provide an actuarial analysis of a proposal to decrease future Social Security benefits to fund consumption today and to quantify its effect on household liquidity.	./cache/cord-299245-qirh1vud.txt	./txt/cord-299245-qirh1vud.txt