Rich people, women, and healthy people live longer. We document that this heterogeneity in life expectancy is large. We use an estimated structural model to assess the impact of life expectancy variation on the elderly’s savings. We find that the differences in life expectancy related to...

This paper constructs a rich model of saving for retired single people. Our framework allows for bequest motives and heterogeneity in medical expenses and life expectancies. We estimate the model using AHEAD data and the method of simulated moments. The data show that out-of-pocket medical...

Medicaid was primarily designed to protect and insure the poor against medical shocks. Yet, poorer people tend to live shorter lifespans and incur lower medical expenses before death than richer people. Taking these and other important dimensions of heterogeneity into account, and carefully...

People have heterogenous life expectancies: women live longer than men, rich people live longer than poor people, and healthy people live longer than sick people. People are also subject to heterogenous out-of-pocket medical expense risk. We show that all of these dimensions of heterogeneity are...

Virtually all developed countries face projected budget shortfalls for their public pension programs. The shortfalls arise for two reasons. First, populations in developed countries are aging rapidly. Second, until recently older individuals in developed countries have been retiring earlier....

Using data from the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) and Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old (AHEAD), this paper presents estimates of the stochastic process that determines both the distribution and dynamics of health costs. We find that the data generating process for health costs...

Using an estimable dynamic programming model of retirement behavior, this paper assesses the relative importance of Medicare and Social Security in determining job exit rates at age 65. Of central importance is whether individuals value health insurance benefits not just for the reduction in...

"We calibrate a model of labor demand to infer the employment responseto a change in the minimum wage in the food away from home industry. Assuming a perfectly competi- tive labor market, the model predicts a 2.5 to 3.5 percent fall in employment in response to a 10 percent minimum wage change....