I estimate the fraction of widows that will be in poverty by projecting the economic status, as measured in 1979, of a cohort of the elderly. The projections are based on an economic model of consumption behavior. I define and estimate a consumption-based measure of poverty status that, I...

Empirical studies have indicated that the elderly seem to accumulate wealth after retirement, and that the desire to leave bequests is an important determinent of saving behavior, both kinds of results have cast doubt on the validity of the life cycle hypothesis of consumption. In the first part...

The Stone-Geary utility function defined over an index of goods, the leisure of the husband, and the leisure of the wife is used to derive the earnings functions of the husband and the wife. The parameters of the utility function are estimated from the parameters of the earnings functions in a...

Although expectations (or subjective probability distributions) play a prominent role in models of decision-making under uncertainty, we have very little data on them and are instead forced to base our models on unverifiable assumptions. Macroeconomic models often assume rational expectations,...

The paper considers the effect on widows' poverty of changes in Social Security survivorship benefits, by a reduction in couples' benefits so that total Social Security cost is unchanged. A twenty percent increase in survivorship benefits, for example, would reduce the 1989 poverty rate of...

We verify that widows are much more likely than couples to be poor and that they make up a large proportion of the poor elderly; 80 percent are widows or other single individuals. Then we seek to explain why the single elderly are poor, with emphasis on widows. We do this by tracing back over...

This paper presents new evidence on cost-of-living indices and annual inflation rates for the elderly population as well as the general population. It employs a now fairly widely accepted adjustment for the inappropriate treatment of housing in the Consumer Price Index. We disaggregate by...

Based on a sample of actual bequests that is population-representative and on the subjective probability of bequests, we estimate the distribution of bequests that the older population will make. We find that the distribution is highly skewed, so that the typical baby-boom person will receive a...

In the first part of the paper using official data sources, we estimate the real income of the elderly and of the rest of the population during the 1570s. We find that income per household of the elderly has increased more rapidly than income per household of the rest of the population, even...