We examine how wealth shocks, in the form of inheritances, affect the mortality rates, health status and health behaviors of older adults, using data from eight waves of the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS). Our main finding is that bequests do not have substantial effects on health, although...

We consider assets when individuals were last observed prior to death in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and trace assets backwards to the age when these individuals were first observed. For most individuals, assets in the last year observed (LYO) were very similar to assets in the first...

We consider how age-health profiles differ by demographic characteristics such as education, race, and ethnicity. A key feature of the analysis is the joint estimation of health and mortality to correct for the effect of mortality selection on observed age-health profiles. The model also allows...

About 20% of German workers retire on disability pensions. Disability pensions provide fairly generous benefits for those who are not already age-eligible for an old-age pension and who are deemed unable to work for health reasons. In this paper, we use two sets of individual survey data to...

I show that the trend towards single households among older nonmarried women, the majority of whom were widows, has been ongoing only since 1940 and investigate the factors that fostered the rise in separate living quarters since mid-century by examining the impact of Old Age Assistance on...

The Medicare trust funds face huge prospective deficits by the end of this decade.This paper discusses trends in six areas that bear on the Medicare problem: the number of the elderly, their health status, use of medical care, labor force participation, income, and living arrangements. Among the...

This paper uses matched data on the elderly and their children to study the provision of time by children to the elderly. It develops a Tobit model as well as a structural model to analyze the determinants of this decision. The main determinants of the amount of time given to parents appear to...

Although income and wealth are frequently used as indicators of well-being, they are increasingly augmented with subjective measures such as life satisfaction to capture broader dimensions of individuals’ well-being. Based on data from large surveys of individuals, life satisfaction in...

This paper presents new evidence on cost-of-living indices and annual inflation rates for the elderly population as well as the general population. It employs a now fairly widely accepted adjustment for the inappropriate treatment of housing in the Consumer Price Index. We disaggregate by...

The highly uneven distribution of Medicare payments among elderly beneficiaries, combined with the predictability of some of the expenditures, poses several challenges to the Medicare program. We present information about the distribution of Medicare expenditures among beneficiaries in specific...