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In July 28, 2004, GAO hosted a forum on the role of the federal government in improving financial literacy. Forum participants included experts in financial literacy and education from federal and state agencies, the financial industry, nonprofit organizations, and academic institutions. This report summarizes highlights of participants' discussion on the topics federal efforts should cover, populations that should be targeted, methods of delivering information, and the role of program evaluation.

Abstract: The key feature of the modern U.S. personal bankruptcy law is to provide debtors a financial fresh start through debt discharge. The primary justification for the discharge policy is to preserve human capital by maintaining incentives for work. In this paper, we test this fresh start argument by providing the first estimate of the effect of personal bankruptcy filing on the labor supply using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).

In this report, GAO's objectives were to determine: (1) what benefit payout options and accompanying information pension plans make available to participants at retirement, (2) what benefit payouts plan participants receive at retirement, and (3) the actions available to help retiring participants preserve their pension and retirement savings plan assets. GAO found that defined benefit (DB) plans make annuities available to all participants at retirement, while defined contribution (DC) plans make lump sums available to almost all participants.

Abstract: It is well accepted that households increase consumption of goods and services in response to an unexpected increase in wealth. Consensus estimates of this wealth effect are in the range of 3 to 5 cents of additional consumption spending in the long run for each additional dollar of wealth. Economic theory also suggests that consumption of leisure, like consumption of goods and services, should increase with positive shocks to wealth. In this paper, we ask whether the run-up in equity prices during the 1990s led older workers to retire earlier than they had previously planned.

Abstract: Despite the long economic expansion, employment among young men is lower today than it was in the late 1960s. This decline has been largely driven by a 17 percentage point reduction in the proportion of high school dropouts working even a single week per year. One common explanation for this trend, declining real wages, ignores the fact that the value of working today depends on future returns to experience. This paper estimates a model of labor supply with returns to experience as an explanatory variable, using data from the Current Population Survey.

Abstract: The issue of whether higher lifetime income households save a larger fraction of their income is an important factor in the evaluation of tax and macroeconomic policy. Despite an outpouring of research on this topic in the 1950s and 1960s, the question remains unresolved and has since received little attention. This paper revisits the issue, using new empirical methods and the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, the Survey of Consumer Finances, and the Consumer Expenditure Survey.

Abstract: While popular wisdom holds that the United States should save more now in anticipation of the aging of the baby boom generation, the optimal response to population aging from a macroeconomic perspective is not clear-cut. Indeed, Cutler, Poterba, Sheiner, and Summers ("CPSS",1990) argued that the optimal response to the coming demographic transition was more likely to be a reduction in national saving than an increase. In this paper we reexamine this question.