Data with which to study disability dynamics usually take the form of successive current-status measures of disability rather than a record of events or spell durations. One recent paper presented a semi-Markov model of disability dynamics in which spell durations were inferred from sequences of...

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...

Declines in health and financial resources lead many older Americans to turn to coresidence and the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program for support. A growing literature examines coresidence choices and SSI participation, stressing the importance of each for vulnerable aged persons....

Social Security retirement benefits have been noted for their capacity to redistribute benefits from higher to lower lifetime earners. However, two-thirds of older women receive spouse and widow benefits and the distributional impact of those benefits has not been well studied. Spouse and widow...

Longevity risk, which is typically portrayed as the problem of people outliving their assets, can be viewed as both an aggregate and an individual-level issue. A related issue is that of ‘active life,' an individual-level phenomenon, or ‘active life expectancy' (ALE), an aggregate...