The effective tax on earnings embodied in the Social Security retirement earnings test has been as high as 50 percent. Surprisingly, among the numerous empirical studies that have examined the earnings test, there is little agreement about whether the earnings test affects elderly labor supply...

The authors study the prediction of latent variables in a finite mixture of linear structural equation models. The latent variables can be viewed as well-defined variables measured with error or as theoretical constructs that cannot be measured objectively, but for which proxies are observed....

It has traditionally been believed that collecting survey measures of total spending necessarily involved asking a large number of questions, too many for inclusion of a comprehensive spending measure in a general-purpose survey. In this paper the authors report on a supplemental survey to the...

In this paper the authors examine the scope of cross-country variation in institutions related to social insurance. Building on the variation they find they assess the value of new micro data that is comparable across countries to help identify key parameters of individual behavior. They present...

Estimates of differential mortality by socioeconomic status play an important role in several domains: in public policy for assessing distributional effects of public programs; in financial markets for the design of life insurance and annuities; and in individual decision making when figuring...

The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires that consumption be continuous over retirement; yet prior research based on partial measures of consumption or on synthetic panels indicates that spending drops at retirement, a result that has been called the retirement-consumption...

The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires "consumption smoothing." According to previous results based on partial spending and on synthetic panels, British and U.S. households apparently reduce consumption at retirement. The reduction cannot be explained by the simple one-good...

The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires consumption smoothing. However, British and U.S. households apparently reduce consumption at retirement and the reduction cannot be explained by the life-cycle model. An interpretation is that retirees are surprised by the inadequacy...