Project Year: 2004

The MRRC commissioned a paper from Axel Börsch-Supan to facilitate a discussion of research issues relevant to Global Aging.

This project will examine the life-cycle consumption behavior of households which enter retirement with lower than “normal” wealth. Using the PSID, the project will test whether differences in planning behavior can explain the variation in retirement wealth across...

Postponing retirement becomes an increasingly important channel to sustain incomes and maintain social security financial solvency, given population aging. Traditional defined benefit systems encourage early retirement. In contrast, the tight link between...

In the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s, the number of adults receiving income from Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) rose by 60 percent and the percentage of adults who were clinically obese doubled. This project will test whether these trends are related....

This project aims to further develop and publicly disseminate the RAND HRS dataset, a user-friendly version of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data. We propose to update the data file with final releases and less-preliminary releases of HRS waves as they become...

Imputation for missing data is critical to the development of high-quality microdata sets. For the most part, imputations are developed from the relationship between the response to a survey variable and the characteristics of the respondent; e.g., imputing an asset...

As in past years we propose to contribute funds toward the support of a secure data environment at the Institute for Social Research, (the data enclave), where researchers can analyze Social Security administrative files without risking a breach of confidentiality....

Retirees often face the question of how to draw down assets that they have accumulated over their worklives. Many recommend that people should purchase a life annuity to protect them against longevity risk, but here we explore an alternative strategy called a...

Prior research has found that consumption drops at retirement, and it has interpreted the drop as resulting from a failure to save adequately due to a lack of forward-looking behavior. Our research will compare the change in consumption at retirement in panel data...

We propose to use the life-cycle model of saving behavior to investigate whether changes in married women’s labor market participation rates lead to mismeasurement of the national saving ratio. We propose to test our specification with microdata and to investigate...

Our past work used baseline data, collected in 1992 from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) linked with pension and Social Security records, to evaluate retirement wealth shortfalls for Americans on the verge of retirement. We concluded that older Americans just...

This project will use data from the Health and Retirement Study to investigate how the Social Security retirement earnings test affects retirement behavior, benefit claiming and retirement incomes; the effects of abolishing the earnings test between early entitlement...

It is widely believed that creating personal accounts as a partial replacement to Social Security benefits will simply involve a reallocation of resources between generations with no gains in economic efficiency. This paper demonstrates that this traditional wisdom...

We propose to evaluate whether an insurer could provide a two-part annuity offering regular income benefits as long as the purchaser is healthy, and a higher disability benefit in the event of poor health. Since health is a multidimensional concept, we will evaluate a...

According to the most recent Social Security Trustees’ Report, the Social Security system currently faces a $10 trillion present value fiscal imbalance. In other words, $10 trillion are needed immediately in order to place the Social Security system on a sustainable...

The 1972 Social Security benefit increase provides an opportunity to examine the consumption response to a large, permanent income increase. While prior research examined the labor supply response, the impact on consumption has generally been ignored. Using the...

We will use a dynamic programming model estimated with data from the Health and Retirement Study to simulate the behavioral effects of various reforms to the OASDI and Medicare programs. Among the reforms we will simulate are changes in the normal retirement age,...