Census's Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) nearly doubles the elderly poverty rate compared to the "Official" Poverty Measure (OPM), a result of the SPM subtraction of medical out-of-pocket (MOOP) expenditures from income. Neither the SPM nor OPM counts health benefits or assets as resources....

We explore the consequences for asset pricing of admitting a bequest motive into an otherwise standard overlapping generations model where agents trade equity and perpetual debt securities. Prices of securities are seen to be approximately 50% higher in an economy with bequests as compared to an...

We estimate the current impact of Medicare on medical expenditure risk and financial strain. At age 65, out-of-pocket expenditures drop by 33% at the mean and 53% among the top 5% of spenders. The fraction of the population with out- of-pocket medical expenditures above income drops by more than...

In this paper we document significantly steeper declines in nondurable expenditures in the UK compared to the US, in spite of income paths being similar. We explore several possible causes, including different employment paths, housing ownership and expenses, levels and paths of health status,...

The objective of the work reported in this paper is to find if the consumption data from the six waves of the Retirement History Survey are consistent with the life cycle hypothesis of consumption and to test the importance of a bequest motive for saving. The 12 data items which are used cover...

This paper summarizes five facts that have emerged from the recent literature on consumption behavior during retirement. Collectively, the recent literature has shown that there is no puzzle with respect to the spending patterns of most households as they transition into retirement. In...

We quantify the role of population aging in the structural transformation process. Household-level data from the U.S. show that the fraction of expenditures devoted to services increases with household age. We use a shift-share decomposition and a quantitative model to show that U.S. population...

There is conflicting evidence on the importance of out-of-pocket medical expenditures as a risk to financial security, particularly at older ages. We revisit this question, focusing on health care spending near the end of life using data from the Health and Retirement Study for the years...

This paper deals with the effects of labor and transfer incomes as determinants of older women's labor force participation. It examines the responsiveness of women aged 48-62 to the level of income available from both work and public transfer programs when deciding between work and nonwork...

The link between circumstances faced by individuals early in life (including those encountered in utero) and later life outcomes has been of increasing interest since the work of Barker in the 1970s on birth weight and adult disease. We provide such a life course perspective for the U.S. by...