Project Year: 2001

Abstract from first paper: 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...

This study explores how earnings variability is related to retirement wealth. Past research has demonstrated that the average American household on the verge of retirement would need to save substantially more, in order to preserve consumption flows in old age. While...

The liability facing a pay-as-you-go social security system can be calculated in several ways. The exact liability measure chosen can significantly affect the conversion of a public pay-as-you-go system to a system based on individually funded accounts. Most...

This study specifies and estimates a structural life cycle model of retirement and wealth and applies that model both to understand the role of the social security early entitlement age in creating a peak in retirements at age 62, and to simulate the effects of...

Abstract from Paper One: Demographers have shown that there are regularities in mortality change over time, and have used these to forecast changes due to population aging. Such models leave out potential economic feedbacks that should be captured by dynamic models...

An early retirement window is an offer, by an employer, of a special incentive to retire at a particular time, beyond that provided by the firm’s pension plan. While such windows have attracted increasing attention in the academic literature and the business...

Over time, the Social Security program has evolved as a pay-as-you-go, or an unfunded system. With the well-known problems plaguing the current system, some have argued for a changeover to a funded system. Funding the system might help participants understand the...

The extent to which men’s versus women’s health affects household wealth and the mechanisms through which these effects occur have important implications for the welfare of older individuals living with a spouse, and in particular for women who are likely to outlive...

This project extends earlier health and work studies by examining how mental health affects transitions out of paid work in the years prior to the traditional Social Security retirement ages. Given recent changes in the labor market, optimal mental health may be as...

This paper develops a method that improves researchers’ ability to account for behavioral responses to policy change in microsimulation models. Current microsimulation models are relatively simple, in part because of the technical difficulty of accounting for...

We examine the retirement behavior of federal civil service workers. This research contributes to the literature that more generally examines how retirement behavior responds to financial incentives. The civil service workers in our study provide an interesting case...

Our broad goal is to develop and extend work on stochastic models of the demographic and economic components of the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance [OASDI] trust fund. For this project, we set up a (free) web site that would provide an interactive...