Structural models explaining retirement decisions of individuals or households in an inter-temporal setting are typically hard to estimate using data on actual retirement decisions, because choice sets are complicated and uncertain and for a large part unobserved by the researcher. This paper...

The Health and Retirement Study (HRS), administered by the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, is a longitudinal survey of the population of U.S. households with at least one adult between the ages of 51 and 61 in 1992 (individuals born between 1931 and 1941). In...

Many countries are including personal retirement accounts (PRAs) as part of their social security systems. PRA systems boost private savings at the macro level by converting a government financial liability into private wealth. At the micro level, however, crowing-out effects on household...

Using the Health and Retirement Study, this research investigates whether an adult child substitutes financial transfers to an elderly parent for time transfers as the cost of his or her time increases. The author develops and estimates a model of the effect of a child's wage rate on time and...

This paper addresses selectivity, substitution and complementarity of elderly support options in Bangladesh, a nation undergoing simultaneous mobility and aging transitions in an environment of limited economic change. Employing detailed qualitative analysis and descriptive quantitative results,...

Inter-vivos cash transfers and bequests between family members total hundreds of billions of dollars each year. They may equalize resources within a generation of a family as well as across family generations. Transfers delayed to the end of life may represent a significant motive for saving....

Although much research has focused on recent increases in annual earnings inequality in the United States, the increases could have come from either of two sources: the distribution of lifetime earnings could have become more unequal or the receipt of lifetime earnings could have become more...

Female age at first marriage and male wage inequality have increased steadily since the late 1960s in the United States. This paper uses a model of female marital search to demonstrate why these two trends could be related. Elementary job search theory, under risk-neutrality, predicts search...

Data from three waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) are used to examine attrition in the context of a large scale panel survey conducted in a low income setting.

This report analyzes retirement-saving behavior and portfolio choice in the United States, Italy, and the Netherlands. The authors test hypotheses on the implications of institutional differences for wealth accumulation and portfolio composition.