A considerable literature examines the optimal decumulation of financial wealth in retirement. We extend this line of research to incorporate housing, which comprises the majority of most households’ non-pension wealth. We use VARs to estimate the relationship between the returns on housing,...

The authors explore whether equities could help solve the woes facing the U.S. retirement system in general, and the Social Security shortfall in particular.

Financing retirement is one of the major challenges facing an aging U.S. population. If individuals continue to retire in their early 60s, many will be hard pressed to maintain an adequate standard of living throughout retirement due to the declining role of Social Security, the shift to 401(k)...

A crucial decision facing retirement savers is how to allocate their savings across broad investment classes, including the choice of how to divide investments between domestic and foreign holdings. This study investigates whether cross-border investing would have been advantageous to U.S....

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...

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...

The share of workers who participate in employer-sponsored tax-deferred plans has been growing, but is still only a minority of workers. Most workers do not contribute the maximum amount allowed by law to employer-sponsored plans. Maximum contributors are more prevalent among high-income...

We investigate whether heterogeneity can explain the differences in mortality between the United States and a more homogeneous country, i.e. Japan. The background of the analysis is the growing gap between life-expectancy in the United States and the world record leader since the 1980s. This...