The goal of this paper is to ascertain whether older women's current and anticipated future labor force patterns has changed over time, and if so, to evaluate the factors associated with longer work lives and plans to continue work at older ages. Using data from both the Health and Retirement...

Subjective expectations about future policy play an important role in individuals' welfare. We examine how workers' expectations about pension reform vary with proximity to reforms, information cost, and aggregate information acquisition. We construct a new pan-European dataset of reform...

We study the short-, medium-, and long-run implications of stimulating annuity markets in a dynamic general-equilibrium overlapping-generations model. We find that beneficial partial-equilibrium effects of stimulating annuity markets are counteracted by negative general-equilibrium...

We study the short-, medium-, and long-run implications of stimulating annuity markets in a dynamic general-equilibrium overlapping-generations model. We find that beneficial partial-equilibrium effects of stimulating annuity markets are counteracted by negative general-equilibrium...

A worker's disposition of his or her defined contribution (DC) retirement account balances at the point of separation from a previous employer is one of the most important decisions a DC plan participant faces. Although this decision has important implications for the retirement security of...

This paper discusses three alternative assumptions concerning household preferences (altruism, self-interest, and a desire for dynasty building) and shows that these assumptions have very different implications for bequest motives and bequest division. After reviewing some of the literature on...

The paper uses a rich administrative dataset on Belgian older workers to provide new evidence on the impact of social security systems on retirement behavior. In addition to measures of financial incentives induced by the social security systems, we construct an eligibility status indicator....

Do households holding risky financial securities tend to invest in the stock market, buying at the top and selling at the bottom? Do they reduce their risk exposure with age and especially when approaching retirement? We answer these questions using data on retirement savings contracts from a...

This paper examines the percentage of traditional or Roth IRAs in the EBRI IRA Database that had a withdrawal in 2011. In this study, only withdrawals from the accounts identified as traditional or Roth IRAs in the database are examined, a total of 15.3 million accounts with $1.11 trillion in...

Lack of financial sophistication has been suggested as a cause of retirement plan failure. We extend previous studies of retirement adequacy by testing the effect of financial sophistication proxies on projected retirement adequacy, using the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) dataset. We...