Past research has shown that income from the Social Security program has contributed to trends towards smaller households, greater residential independence - the tendency to live alone rather than with others - and a greater prevalence of home ownership late in life. However, the mechanism...

Annual, before-tax income is the most common official statistic used to measure economic well-being and therefore underlies the design of most anti-poverty programs or other redistributive economic policies. Notwithstanding, extended income measures as well as consumption based measures are...