Measures of households' past behavior, their expectations with respect to future events and contingencies, and their intentions with respect to future behavior are frequently collected using household surveys. These questions are conceptually difficult. Answering them requires elaborate...

Retirement savings decisions should depend on expectations of Social Security retirement income. Persons may be uncertain of their future Social Security benefits for several reasons, including uncertainty about their future labor earnings, the formula now determining social security benefits,...

We report here on the design and first application of an interactive computer-administered personal interview (CAPI) survey eliciting from high school students and college undergraduates their expectations of the income they would earn if they were to complete different levels of schooling. We...

We analyze probabilistic expectations of equity returns elicited in the Survey of Economic Expectations in 1999 %uF8182001 and in the Michigan Survey of Consumers in 2002 %uF8182004. Our empirical findings suggest that individuals use interpersonally variable but intrapersonally stable processes...

We report on our preliminary findings from an innovative module of survey questions in the RAND American Life Panel designed to measure willingness to delay take-up of Social Security benefits. Among respondents who expect to stop working full time prior to turning age 62, over 60 percent report...

We assess the welfare implications of alternative retirement plan investment options given that households may not invest according to optimal portfolio choice theory but may instead use simple decision rules. We simulate the performance of lifestyle, lifecycle, and other simple strategies for...

Are variations in the success rate of searches by race informative about racial bias if police are motivated by crime minimization rather than success-rate maximization? We show that the basic idea of extracting information from hit rates may still be valid, provided one can verify some simple...