Forecasting Social Security Actuarial Assumptions

Abstract

This paper presents a forecasting model of economic assumptions that are inputs to projections of the Social Security system. Social Security projections are made to help policy-makers understand the financial stability of the system. Because system income and expenditures are subject to changes in law, they are controllable and not readily amenable to forecasting techniques. Hence, we focus directly on the four major economic assumptions to the system: inflation rate, investment returns, wage rate, and unemployment rate. Population models, the other major input to Social Security projections, require special demographic techniques and are not addressed here.

Our approach to developing a forecasting model emphasizes exploring characteristics of the data. That is, we use graphical techniques and diagnostic statistics to display patterns that are evident in the data. These patterns include (1) serial correlation, (2) conditional heteroscedasticity, (3) contemporaneous correlations, and (4) cross-correlations among the four economic series. To represent patterns in the four series, we use multivariate autoregressive, moving average (ARMA) models with generalized autoregressive, conditionally heteroscedastic (GARCH) errors.

The outputs of the fitted models are the forecasts. Because the forecasts can be used for nonlinear functions such as discounting present values of future obligations, we present a computer-intensive method for computing forecast distributions. The computer-intensive approach also allows us to compare alternative models via out-of-sample validation and to compute exact multivariate forecast intervals, in lieu of approximate simultaneous univariate forecast intervals. We show how to use the forecasts of economic assumptions to forecast a simplified version of a fund used to protect the Social Security system from adverse deviations. We recommend the use of the multivariate model because it establishes important lead and lag relationships among the series, accounts for information in the contemporaneous correlations, and provides useful forecasts of a fund that is analogous to the one used by the Social Security system.