We utilize three sets of data resources — the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), linked Social Security earnings records of the HRS respondents, and publicly available pension plan descriptions — to study pension wealth accumulations among the recent HRS cohorts. We document the trends in...

The demographic transition that began at the end of the eighteenth century saw dramatic reductions in infant and child mortality, accompanied by declining fertility. Both trends resulted in populations whose stable dynamics imply much older populations. Moreover, the enormous success at...

We have found modest effects of widowhood events on loss of health insurance. There are also modest effects of widowhood on labor supply, which we have not as yet attempted to attribute to insurance demand. Even new widowhood events, however, are not random with respect to initial conditions....

We analyzed the economic consequences of a husband's death using events that occurred between the first two waves of the HRS and AHEAD studies. We compared poverty transitions against published results from Social Security's Retirement History Survey of the 1970s. Widowhood remains an important...

Objectives: Little is known regarding the amount of time spent by unpaid caregivers providing help to elderly individuals for disabilities associated with diabetes mellitus (DM). We sought to obtain nationally representative estimates of the time, and associated cost, of informal caregiving...

We analyze newly available data from the Health and Retirement Study on senior citizens' take-up of Medicare Part D and the associated SSA Low-Income Subsidy. We find that economic factors - specifically, demand for prescription drugs - drove the decision to enroll in Part D. For the most part,...