If Americans continue to retire at age 63, a great many will risk income shortfalls especially at older ages. Because work directly increases current income, Social Security benefits, retirement saving, and decreases the length of retirement, a logical solution would be to increase the age of...

The employment of older workers into their mid-60s will be critical to their ability to ensure a secure retirement. One of the risks threatening the ability to work to older ages is being “displaced,” with displacement defined as the elimination of the worker’s job due to a shift in the...

Economic conditions and labor force participation vary significantly across the states of the Union. Despite these marked differences, little is known about the reasons for such variations in retirement patterns. Using the Current Population Survey for the period 1977-2007, this paper...

This paper estimates how much people actually receive in retirement relative to earnings before retirement when all sources of income, including income generated by homeownership, are combined. Previous studies find that middle class people need between 70 and 75 percent of their pre-retirement...

Defined benefit plans in the private sector are on the decline. And the early 21st century produced an uptick in the pace of decline driven by the financially devastating impact of the ‘perfect storm’ of plummeting stock prices and low interest rates, legislation that will require...

House prices rose 60 percent between 2000 and 2007 before the housing bubble burst. The question is whether the housing boom made people better or worse prepared for retirement. Theory says that infinitely-lived households experience no increase in their real net worth when housing prices...

Life-cycle funds offer an intuitive approach to retirement investing. Despite their intuitive appeal, the empirical and theoretical support for life-cycle funds is mixed. We examine life-cycle funds using dynamic optimization techniques to evaluate the optimal asset allocation over the life...

We use the 1998-2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to investigate how households change their asset holdings at older ages. We find a notable increase in the net worth of older households between 1998 and 2006, with most of the growth due to housing. Our results indicate that,...

Many employers match employee contributions to 401(k) plans. However, the employer cost of continuing this practice may increase rapidly as trends towards automatic enrollment boost employee participation. This paper examines the relationship between employer matching behavior and automatic...

Today men on average retire at 63 and women at 62, and they can expect to spend 20 years in retirement. But if Americans continue to retire as early as they do today, many will not have adequate income once they stop working. Social Security will provide less relative to pre-retirement earnings...