Several recent assessments suggest that the majority of U.S. workers are at risk of having inadequate resources to maintain their work-life standards of living in retirement. These assessments are often based on models that fail to reflect patterns of income, consumption and savings that vary...

What is the optimal retirement age? This paper looks at the optimal retirement age from various perspectives. Most of the current pension laws relating to retirement age were codified decades ago, and they have become badly out of date given what we now know about longevity, about health and...

Mental Accounting is an important tool enabling us to make countless decisions each day. We code, categorize and evaluate our expenses using a system that we typically develop with our first paycheck. We routinely allocate some portion of our money to many buckets, and often over commit...

The tax benefits accorded employer-sponsored pension retirement plans are often criticized because of the magnitude of the revenue costs to the federal treasury and the skewed distribution of the benefits provided to higher earners. The estimates of the value of the tax preferences often ignore...

Pension reforms have been high on the political agenda in many developed countries over recent years and pension issues have been discussed intensely in the public as a result. In recent years, much effort has been devoted to make state, public and private pension systems fiscally more...

Whether higher lifetime income households do save a larger share of their income is one of the longstanding empirical questions in economics that has been surprisingly difficult to answer. We use both consumption data and a new dataset containing both individual survey data on wealth holdings...

Eine verpflichtende Altersvorsorge soll der besonders bei den Solo-Selbstständigen vermuteten Altersarmutsgefährdung vorbeugen. Die empirische Analyse offenbart aber, dass sich das Armutsrisiko sowohl während der Erwerbsphase als auch im Alter nicht auf die Gruppe der Selbstständigen ohne...

This paper quantifies the economic well-being of different age groups and the extent of their reliance on incomes from public and private sources. The aim is to establish how social benefits, and the taxes needed to finance them, affect income levels and disparities across different age groups....

In this report, we present improved wealth measures for the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which aim to reduce the effect of observation error on wealth levels and changes in wealth. The new wealth measures take account of the asset verification section in the HRS and use cross-wave...

This paper quantifies the economic well-being of different age groups and the extent of their reliance on incomes from public and private sources. The aim is to establish how social benefits, and the taxes needed to finance them, affect income levels and disparities across different age groups....