This paper explores IRA withdrawal behavior of older Americans using a nationally representative sample. The data for this paper come from the University of Michigan's Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging. The HRS, the most comprehensive...

With the decline of defined benefit (DB) pension plans, there has been some renewed interest in providing other annuity income options to American workers, but demand for annuities has remained low in the United States. To develop future annuity income solutions, it is important to understand...

A key weakness of many retirement income models is that they use average estimates for life expectancy, and, consequently, provide workers with only a 50 percent chance of having adequate income in retirement. The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) has developed a new model - the...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we estimate reduced form retirement and wealth equations. The retirement equation relates the probability of retiring to the quot;premium valuequot;, a forward looking measure of the future value of pensions and social security that better...

A worker's disposition of his or her defined contribution (DC) retirement account balances at the point of separation from a previous employer is one of the most important decisions a DC plan participant faces. Although this decision has important implications for the retirement security of...

This paper examines the percentage of traditional or Roth IRAs in the EBRI IRA Database that had a withdrawal in 2011. In this study, only withdrawals from the accounts identified as traditional or Roth IRAs in the database are examined, a total of 15.3 million accounts with $1.11 trillion in...

This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the effects of the Great Recession on the wealth held by the near retirement age population from 2006 to 2012. For the Early Boomer cohort (ages 51 to 56 in 2004), real wealth in 2012 remained 3.6 percent below its 2006 value....

This paper uses asset and labor market data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to investigate how the recent "Great Recession" has affected the wealth and retirement of those in the population who were just approaching retirement age at the beginning of the recession, a potentially...