The Survey of Income and Program Participation past Is Prologue: Simulating Lifetime Social Security Earnings for the Twenty-first Century

This paper projects lifetime Social Security earnings until retirement using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) matched to Social Security records of annual earnings from 1951 through 1993. We first develop, estimate and test gender-specific multiple regression models of ten-year earnings intervals using the matched 1984 SIPP panel. We find strong relationships predicting the mean indexed monthly earnings level in the ten year period of 1984-93. We then use the models to project (unobserved) Social Security earnings from 1994 through retirement for persons born between 1931 and 1955. By adding projected earnings to observed annual earnings to date, we forecast lifetime Social Security earnings for persons retiring early in the twenty-first century. One set of models relies exclusively on the information in the Social Security administrative records. We improve the predictive power of the models slightly by using basic socio-demographic characteristics from the 1984 SIPP.