This study explores the relationship between general human capital investment, financial knowledge, occupational spillovers, and the accumulation of wealth in a primarily descriptive manner. Drawing upon human capital theory and following previous related work by Delavande, Rohwedder and Willis...

This paper investigates how increases in the level of maximum earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax have affected Social Security benefits and taxes. The analysis uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to ask how different the present value of own benefits and taxes would...

How do low-income households think about retirement? Do they think about retirement? If so, when do they think they will retire, and what is it they plan to live on? In this paper, we present evidence on these questions based on 51 qualitative interviews with low-income families in the Detroit...

Evidence suggests that older workers with disabilities have been hit particularly hard by the recent recession. The increased difficulty in finding a job faced by individuals with disabilities, combined with the longer spells of unemployment experienced by all workers in this recession, could...

This paper assesses the effect of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the labor supply of Americans ages 50 and older. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, we estimate a dynamic programming model of retirement that accounts for both saving and...

Americans face the challenges of retirement with varying degrees of preparation. Evidence indicates that that many individuals may not be making the best possible choices with respect to their Social Security and retirement savings. We assess the subjective expectations of non-retirees and find...

Irregular withdrawals from IRAs and DC pensions are not included in standard measures of household income in the CPS or Health and Retirement Study. Yet, among retirees such withdrawals can supplement regular retirement income to finance consumption. It has been difficult to assess their...

Two competing explanations for why consumers have trouble with financial decisions are gaining momentum. One is that people are financially illiterate since they lack understanding of simple economic concepts and cannot carry out computations such as computing compound interest, which could...

We develop and estimate a model in which individuals make decisions on consumption, human capital investment, labor supply, and retirement. Unlike all previous work, our model allows both an endogenous wage process (which is typically assumed exogenous in the human capital and earnings dynamics...

How does retirement influence subjective well-being? Some studies suggest retirement does not affect subjective well-being or may improve it. Others suggest it adversely affects it. This paper aims at advancing our understanding of the effect of retirement on subjective well-being by (1) using...