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

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.