Recent literature has documented a widening gap in mortality in the United States between individuals with high socioeconomic status (SES) and low SES. An important question is whether this trend will continue. In this paper we document trends and inequalities in the health status at ages 54 to...

State and local government pension plans cover about 19.5 million participants, and many participants are heavily reliant on these pensions for retirement income. Most of these plans, however, are underfunded. Based on data from the Health and Retirement Study, we examined the lifetime work...

After retirement, the primary sources of uncertainty with respect to an individual's economic status are longevity, investment outcomes and out-of-pocket spending on health care. In previous work, we estimated economic preparation for retirement, taking into account the risk of living to an...

We study the effects of the 2007-2009 recession on the population age 55 and older. Households in and near retirement have suffered sizeable losses in assets as a result of the economic crisis. There are a number of ways in which households might respond: reduce spending and with that increase...

We studied how households adjust their spending in response to the financial crisis. Based on five waves of data from the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey, we quantified the reduction in total consumption and in specific categories of consumption in the older population at large and by...

It is well-established that differential mortality according to wealth or income introduces bias into age profiles of these variables when estimated on cross-sectional or synthetic cohort data. However, little is known about whether this association is also found with consumption, and if so, how...

The Social Security trust fund is predicted to be depleted by 2041. While there are several viable reform proposals to restore long-term solvency of the Social Security system, one important element that is critical to the success of any reform remains unknown: how will individuals respond to,...

This paper forecasts the retirement patterns and resources of the Early Baby Boomers by estimating forward-looking dynamic models of labor force participation, wealth accumulation and pension and Social Security benefit claiming for older workers using seven waves of HRS-data. The two most...

Earlier research suggests that many people in their fifties and early sixties are not well informed about their Social Security entitlements. This paper investigates the effect of deviations between predicted and realized Social Security benefits on several measures of well-being in retirement,...

In support of research on the older population, we produced cleaned variables based on data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to capture information on withdrawals from individual retirement accounts (IRAs). Where necessary, imputations for missing values have been performed using...