EFFECTS ON THE BUDGET DEFICIT AND THE OASDI TRUST FUND
The CWHS-MBR provides the definitive means for estimating the effects of the CPI
housing bias on both the federal budget deficit and the OASDI Trust Fund. This file contains
a 1 percent sample of Social Security participants and all associated benefits paid in the period
from 1975 to 1984 during which the CPI-W was subject to a housing bias. For computational
purposes, we drew a twenty-percent random sample from the 2.7 million records on the CWHS
file that we then matched with MBR records, yielding a sample of 536 thousand. For each of
these observations, we estimated complete lifetime contributions and benefits (see Duggan and
Gillingham (1999) for details). We then reconstructed lifetime benefits as they would have been
paid if the price index used to compute benefits had been our adjusted CPI-W rather than the
official CPI-W during the period 1975-84.4 This data set allows our results to carefully reflect
that, under current law, post-entitlement indexation errors have a temporary effect on benefits,
lasting for as long as a given generation of primary and associated beneficiaries survives.