This paper formulates a model of retirement behavior based on the solution to a stochastic dynamic programming problem. The workers objective is to maximize expected discounted utility over his remaining lifetime. At each time period the worker chooses how much to consume and whether to work...

We build upon the growing literature on financial literacy, which studies the prevalence of lack of knowledge about various financial issues, and analyze how much people know about the Social Security rules using a small pilot survey conducted in 2007, and a follow-up and extended survey funded...

The need for Social Security Reform in the next years is hardly a matter of debate. Therefore, the widespread believe among Americans that Social Security will not be able to pay benefits in the long run at the level that was anticipated, does not come as a surprise. The government acknowledges...

The labor supply and benefit claiming incentives provided by the early retirement rules of the Social Security Old Age benefits program are of growing importance as the Normal Retirement Age (NRA) increases to 67, the labor force participation of Older Americans rises, and a variety of reforms...

An increasing number of longitudinal data sets collect expectations information regarding a variety of future individual level events and decisions, providing researchers with the opportunity to explore expectations over micro variables in detail. We present a theoretical framework and an...

This paper estimates the expectations of older male workers in the form of a 130 million element Markov transition probability matrix specifying the joint stochastic process for workers’ income, health, martial and employment status, conditioned on workers’ decisions about labor force...