Social Security and saving: A time-series econometrics pedagogical example (with R code)

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

Economics

Publication Date

12-4-2017

Abstract

In 1974, and then again in 1996, Martin Feldstein published studies of the impact of the Social Security system on private saving in the U.S. economy. He found that Social Security depressed personal saving by a substantial amount—up to 50 percent. The author uses the Feldstein data and empirical models in this article to illustrate the steps in analyzing distributed lag problems. These particular data and methods exemplify, among other things, unit roots, autocorrelated residuals, spurious regression, trend breaks, and cointegration. As such, they provide an excellent pedagogical case study. All R code for this article is provided so that students may replicate and extend the included models and results.

Comments

This article was originally published in The Journal of Economic Education. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Due to copyright restrictions, this article is not available for free download from ScholarWorks @ CWU.

Journal

The Journal of Economic Education

Rights

© 2018 Taylor & Francis

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