Older Americans, even those who are long retired, have strong willingness to work, especially in jobs with flexible schedules. For many, labor force participation near or after normal retirement age is limited more by a lack of acceptable job opportunities or low expectations about finding them...

Individuals face significant late-in-life risks, prominently including the need for long-term care (LTC). Yet, they hold little long-term care insurance (LTCI). In this paper we use a structural model and a purpose-designed dataset to understand the determinants of insurance demand. We...

Popularity is self reinforcing. The attention garnered by popular options propels further interest in them. Yet rather than blindly follow the crowd, most pay attention to how well these items match their tastes. We model this role of social learning in guiding selective attention and market...

Older wealthholders spend down assets much more slowly than predicted by classic life-cycle models. This paper introduces health-dependent utility into a model in which preferences for bequests, expenditures when in need of long-term care (LTC), and ordinary consumption combine with health and...

This paper introduces the Vanguard Research Initiative (VRI), a new panel survey of wealthholders designed to yield high-quality measurements of a large sample of older Americans who arrive at retirement with significant financial assets. The VRI links survey data with a variety of...

<title>Abstract</title> Although the homeownership rate rose from 65 percent in 1995 to 69 percent in 2005, this rise appears difficult to sustain. We argue that the development of new shared‐equity mortgages (SEMs) that blur the lines between debt and equity would propel further advances in homeownership....

The authors present a three-stage model of market dynamics. In the first stage, routine behavior tends to keep information of common interest trapped in private hands. In the second stage, private information reaches a threshold that triggers some agents to alter their behavior; these actions...

Monetary policymakers are uncertain about the state of the economy and learn from the economy's reaction to policy. Private agents, however, anticipate any systematic attempt to incorporate this information into future policy. The authors analyze this feedback in the context of a monetary...

Why do similar households end up with very different levels of wealth? We show that differences in the attitudes and skills with which they approach financial planning are a significant factor. We use new and unique survey data to assess these differences and to measure each household's...

We present a new approach to the theory of imperfect competition and apply it to study price competition among differentiated products. The central result provides general conditions under which there exists a pure strategy price equilibrium for any number of firms producing any set of products....