The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires that consumption be continuous over retirement; yet prior research based on partial measures of consumption or on synthetic panels indicates that spending drops at retirement, a result that has been called the retirement-consumption...

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

Empirical studies have indicated that the elderly seem to accumulate wealth after retirement, and that the desire to leave bequests is an important determinent of saving behavior, both kinds of results have cast doubt on the validity of the life cycle hypothesis of consumption. In the first part...

Using data from the 1964 Survey of the Economic Behavior of the Affluent, we estimate directly the fraction of household assets which come from inheritances and the fraction from gifts. These data are well suited for this calculation because the survey is heavily weighted toward households with...

The Stone-Geary utility function defined over an index of goods, the leisure of the husband, and the leisure of the wife is used to derive the earnings functions of the husband and the wife. The parameters of the utility function are estimated from the parameters of the earnings functions in a...

The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires "consumption smoothing." According to previous results based on partial spending and on synthetic panels, British and U.S. households apparently reduce consumption at retirement. The reduction cannot be explained by the simple one-good...

The objective of the paper is to find empirically whether husbands and wives tend to retire at the same time, and to give an explanation of the findings. Similarity of retirement dates could be caused by similarity of tastes (assortative mating), by economic variables, or by the complimentarity...

Our purpose in the present study is to analyze a new and rich body of data on the elderly to study the supply side of the effect of social security on the early retirement decision. Toward this end, section 2 presents a brief description of some previous studies of retirement behavior. While...

This paper proposes and analyzes a life-cycle model of consumption by couples. The model is considerably more complicated than the standard model for singles because it has to account for the welfare of a surviving spouse. The determinants of consumption are the survival paths of each spouse,...

This paper investigates whether subjective expectations about future mortality affect consumption and bequests motives. We estimate a dynamic life-cycle model based on subjective survival rates and wealth from the panel dataset Asset and Health Dynamics among Oldest Old. We find that bequest...