We examine the current wealth adequacy of older U.S. households using the 1998-2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We find that the median older U.S. household is reasonably well situated, with a ratio of comprehensive net wealth to present value poverty- line wealth of about...

Defined benefit (DB) pension freezes in large healthy firms such as Verizon and IBM, as well as terminations of plans in the struggling steel and airline industries, highlight the fact that these traditional pensions cannot be viewed as risk-free promises from the employeeÂ’s perspective....

In this paper, we develop a measure of household resources that converts total financial, nonfinancial, and annuitized assets into an expected annual amount of wealth per person in retirement. We use this measure, which we call "annualized comprehensive wealth," to investigate spend-down...

This paper investigates the impact of demographic shocks on optimal decisions about saving, life insurance, and, most centrally, asset allocation. We analyze these choices within the framework of a life-cycle model that features exogenous changes in family composition, heterogeneity in lifetime...

The deterministic extended-path (EP) method for solving dynamic stochastic optimisation problems approximates conditional expectations instead of approximating a model's complex non-linear dynamics. For a benchmark real business cycle model we show that this straightforward approach provides...

The costs of inflation are assessed using an endogenous growth macroeconomic model in which money reduces the time-costs of transacting. Inflation reduces growth in the model, which supports recent empirical evidence. Although simulations show time-costs to be small, inflation raises these costs...