The authors use a unique cross-country data set covering nearly 22,000 elderly individuals (age 50+) from 10 European Countries. Cross-country differences in the prevalence of obesity in older Europeans are substantial and exceed sociodemographic differentials in obesity. Obesity is strongly...

While the fraction of obese people is not as large in Europe as in the United States, obesity is becoming an important issue in Europe as well. Using comparable data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Health and Retirement Study in the U.S. (HRS), this...

A positive relationship between socio-economic status (SES) and health, the so-called "health-wealth gradient", is repeatedly found in most industrialized countries with similar levels of health care technology and economic welfare. This study analyzes causality from health to wealth (health...

The authors study the effect of attrition and other forms of non-response on the representativity over time of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) sample born 1931-1941; the sample was initially drawn in 1992. Although some baseline characteristics of respondents do appear correlated with...

The authors look at the effect of the 2000 repeal of the earnings test above the normal retirement age on retirement expectations of workers in the Health and Retirement Study, aged 51 to 61 in 1992. For men, they find that those whose marginal wage rate increased when the earnings test was...

It is widely believed that health plays a major role in retirement decisions. The most important problem in including health in retirement models is the lack of availability of a good measure of health at the individual level in existing data sets. This problem is exacerbated when a model...

The authors study labor supply of elderly couples by means of a collective model. The model allows individuals to enjoy leisure more (or less) in company of their spouse (complementarity/ externalities in leisure). Preferences and the intra-household bargaining process are identified by using...

Recent studies show that financial literacy is strongly positively related to household wealth, but there is also substantial cross-sectional variation in both financial literacy and wealth levels. To explore these patterns, the authors develop a calibrated stochastic life cycle model which...

The authors use a calibrated stochastic life-cycle model of endogenous health spending, asset accumulation and retirement to investigate the causes behind the increase in health spending and life expectancy over the period 1965-2005. They estimate that technological change along with the...

The 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act added a new prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program known as Part D (prescription drug coverage), as well as the Low-Income Subsidy (LIS) program to provide "extra help" with premiums, deductibles, and copayments for...