This paper evaluates potential responses to reductions in early Social Security retirement benefits. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) linked to administrative records, we find that Social Security coverage is quite uneven in the older population: one-quarter of respondents in their...

This paper explores how earnings variability is related to retirement wealth. Past research has demonstrated that the average American household on the verge of retirement would need to save substantially more, in order to preserve consumption flows in old age. While several socioeconomic...

Over 80 percent of households in their 50s are homeowners and housing wealth accounts for over half of total household wealth for most of these homeowners. The evidence in the literature on whether the elderly are consuming their housing wealth has been mixed. Because home sales are infrequent...

This paper develops an equilibrium model of the annuities market where agents have private information about their mortality, and where the predictive value of this information decays over time. The paper shows that in this case, insurance companies will observe a duration-related trend in the...

According to economic theory, well-being or utility depends on consumption. However, at the household level, total consumption is rarely well measured because its collection requires a great deal of survey time. As a result income has been widely used to assess well-being and poverty rates. Yet,...

This paper examines the extent to which private savings responds to the availability of a social insurance program. We focus on the Medicaid nursing home assistance program and uses variation in state Medicaid policies in the 1960s and 1990s to identify whether household wealth correlates...

We present forecasts of the Social Security trust fund, modeling key demographic and economic variables as time series. We evaluate plans for achieving long-term solvency by raising the normal retirement age (NRA), increasing taxes, or investing some portion of the fund in the stock market....

Data suggest the distribution of wealth among households in the United States and the United Kingdom has become more equal over the last century — though the pattern may have reversed recently. This paper shows that a model in which all households save for life–cycle reasons and some for...

Wealth accumulation has important implications for the relative well-being of households. In this paper, we describe how household wealth in the United States varies by gender and family type. We find evidence of large differences in observed wealth between single-female-headed households and...

Second home equity is an important component of both housing equity and net worth for the old population. It has been covered, implicitly or explicitly, across all waves of HRS and AHEAD surveys. But due to a skip-pattern error, not all households with second homes were asked detailed questions...