This paper shows that households who enter retirement with low wealth consistently followed non-permanent income consumption rules during their working years. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), household wealth in 1989 is predicted for a sample of 50-65 year olds using both current...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, this paper measures knowledge about future social security and pension benefits by comparing respondent reports of their expected benefits with benefits calculated from social security earnings records and employer provided descriptions of pension...

We estimate the magnitude of any direct effect of retirement on health. Since retirement is endogenous to heath, it is not possible to estimate this effect by comparing the health of individuals before and after they retire. As an alternative we use institutional features of the pension system...

Traditional economic models treat the household as a single individual, and do not allow for separate preferences of and possible conflicts of interest between husbands and wives. Since wives are typically younger than their husbands and life expectancy for women exceeds that for men, wives may...

This project evaluates how workers might invest their Personal Retirement Account (PRA) funds between safe and risky assets, depending on whether they are offered a rate of return guarantee on the risky asset. We focus on how asset allocation decisions might differ depending on participants’...

How might retirees consider deploying the retirement assets accumulated in a defined contribution pension plan? One possibility would be to purchase an immediate annuity. Another approach, called the “phased withdrawal” strategy in the literature, would have the retiree invest his funds and...

A characteristic feature of survey data on household wealth is the high incidence of missing data—roughly one in three respondents who report owning an asset are unable or unwilling to provide an estimate of the exact amount of their holding. A partial solution to that problem is to devise a...

This paper is based on a structural model of retirement and saving, estimated with data for a sample of married men in the Health and Retirement Study. It explains the relation of specific features of Social Security -- the benefit amount, the early entitlement age, the normal retirement age,...

Demographers have shown that there are regularities in mortality change overtime, and have used these to forecast changes due to population aging. Such models leave out potential economic feedbacks that should be captured by dynamic models such as the general-equilibrium, overlapping-generations...

Social Security Administration W-2 records contain employee annual tax-deferred contributions for 1990-2003 and sufficient information to calculate tax-deferred contributions for 1984-1989. We use this information to compare tax-deferred contribution profiles of three cohorts of respondents in...