Economists have invested a great deal of effort in trying to understand the motivation for family transfers, yet recent empirical work testing the seemingly appealing models of altruism and exchange has led to decidedly mixed results. A major stumbling block has been the lack of adequate data....

Each year parents transfer a great deal of money to their adult children. While intuition might suggest that these transfers are altruistic and made out of concern for the well-being of the children, the fundamental prediction of the altruistic model has been decisively rejected in empirical...

Discussions of changes in the Social Security program must necessarily consider the impact of such changes on the well-being of the poor elderly. Under the current system, the financial needs of this population are met by the Supplement Security Income program (SSI). SSI has done much to improve...

The choice of a retirement date is one of the most important decisions facing older workers. It is a decision that will affect their economic well-being for the remainder of their lives. One of the factors that undoubtedly impacts this choice is the worker's health. However, the many studies...