Empirical analyses of the effects of public and private pensions on household saving impose strong assumptions in order to obtain a tractable empirical model: fixed retirement and pension claiming ages, no borrowing constraint, little or no uncertainty, and no institutional restrictions on...

We use a US Social Security reform as a quasi-experiment to provide evidence on framing effects in retirement behavior. The reform increased the full retirement age (FRA) from 65 to 66 in two month increments per year of birth for cohorts born from 1938 to 1943. We find strong evidence that the...

The labor market is often asserted to be characterized by rigidities that make it difficult for older workers to carry out their desired trajectory from work to retirement. An important source of rigidity is restrictions on hours of work imposed by firms that use team production or face high...

We study the effect of receiving an inheritance on the labor force participation (LFP) of both the recipient and the recipient's spouse in a population of older married couples. An inheritance is not subject to laws governing division of marital property at divorce, because it is not acquired...

We estimate the effects of policy and labor market variables on the fertility, union formation and dissolution, type of union (cohabiting versus married), and partner choices of the NLSY79 cohort of women. These demographic behaviors interact to determine the family structure experienced by the...

This paper provides a comprehensive demographic analysis of the family structure experiences of children in the U.S. Childbearing and transitions among co-residential union states defined by single, cohabiting, and married are analyzed jointly. A novel contribution is to distinguish men by their...

After nearly a full century of decline, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of older men in the United States leveled off in the 1980s, and began to increase in the late 1990s. We use a time series of cross sections from 1962 to 2005 to model the LFPR of men aged 55-69, with the aim of...

Consumption expenditure declines sharply at the time of retirement for many households, but the majority maintain a smooth consumption path. A simple life cycle model with uncertainty about the time of retirement can account for this pattern. A richer version of the model is calibrated to data...