NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. This paper examines how labor income volatility and social security benefits … can influence lifecycle household portfolios. We examine how much the individual optimally saves and where, taking into … account liquid financial wealth and annuities, and stocks as well as bonds. Higher labor income uncertainty and lower old …

The size of the average American household has fallen dramatically -from six in 1850 to three in 2000. To explain this … decline we model households as collections of roommates who share the costs of household public goods. If private goods are … more income elastic than public goods, as we document in the paper, an increase in income endogenously leads to smaller …