As the baby boomers begin to retire, a great deal remains unknown about the evolution of wealth toward the end of life. In this paper, we develop a new measure of household resources that converts total financial, nonfinancial, and annuitized assets into an expected annual amount of wealth per...

We examine the current wealth adequacy of older U.S. households using the 1998-2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We find that the median older U.S. household is reasonably well situated, with a ratio of comprehensive net wealth to present value poverty-line wealth of about 3.9...

A number of recent studies find that poor health is empirically associated with a safer portfolio allocation. It is difficult to say, however, whether this relationship is truly causal. Both health status and portfolio choice are influenced by unobserved characteristics such as risk attitudes,...

We develop a simple model of pension financing to study the effects of pension risk on shareholder value. In the model, firms minimize costs, total compensation must clear the labor market, and a government pension insurer guarantees a portion of promised benefits. We find that in the absence of...

As the baby boomers begin to retire, a great deal remains unknown about the evolution of wealth toward the end of life. In this paper, we develop a new measure of household resources that converts total financial, nonfinancial, and annuitized assets into an expected annual amount of wealth per...

Dramatic structural changes in the U.S. pension system, along with the impending wave of retiring baby boomers, have given rise to a broad policy discussion of the adequacy of household retirement wealth. We construct a uniquely comprehensive measure of wealth for households aged 51 and older in...

Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed-income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due....

We construct two measures of the current wealth adequacy of older U.S. households using the 1998--2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The first is the ratio of "comprehensive wealth"--defined as net worth plus the expected value of future income streams--to the wealth that would...

We study firms' pension prefunding and portfolio allocation choices in a model in which firms trade off the need to compensate workers for the financial risk in their pension benefit against the cost advantage that may be gained by exploiting underpriced pension insurance. In the absence of...

In this paper, we develop a measure of household resources that converts total financial and non-financial assets, plus annuity-like assets (mainly, Social Security and defined-benefit pensions) into an expected annual amount of wealth per person in retirement. We use this measure, which we call...