Project Year: 2014

There are many stories of retirement-age parents providing significant resources to their children as the latter deal with unemployment, marital instability, postsecondary educational expenditures, and the cost of raising their own children. Recently, these...

The goal of this project is to estimate a structural model of household behavior in old age. Within couples, spouses can provide care for one another and pool resources. There are differences in health and medical costs faced by singles and couples and their ability...

Assessing economic preparation for retirement has relied on measures of income and wealth. However, retired persons have considerably more time available than workers. Some research has suggested that retired persons use their additional time to substitute for...

This project has two objectives. The first is to investigate the insurance role of spousal labor supply for married couples nearing retirement. Specifically, we will consider households in which one spouse experiences a job loss, wage shock or health shock, and we...

SSI is the primary government transfer program targeted towards assisting low income older adults. Prior studies have found that only 50-60% of individuals eligible for SSI participate. We will provide more recent estimates of program take-up and investigate various...

Individuals are increasingly encouraged to extend their working life. This project will extend our knowledge of the effect that retiring later has on subjective well-being. This will enable us to sketch a more complete picture of the well-being of the elderly,...

We propose to write a Research Policy Brief on the Australian system of retirement incomes, focusing on the means-tested component. The Brief will endeavor to describe that component, to remark upon its performance so far, and to outline several economic arguments...

One rationale for raising Social Security retirement ages is the increased life expectancy among Americans. But, this rationale is challenged by a recent analysis finding that life expectancy among those with low levels of education is actually falling. We will...

We propose to use the HRS, including restricted data, to ask how various approaches to means testing, based on different criteria, might affect benefits and taxes at the household level. We will analyze the likely distributional effects of various possible approaches...

U.S. Social Security retirement benefits are paid as an annuity, though some workers might be willing to trade a portion of the stream for a lump sum. Previously we showed theoretically that allowing people to receive their deferred credits as a lump sum rather than...

Understanding whether the elderly are saving adequately is fundamental in understanding their living standards. One factor that affects wealth accumulation is the extent to which parents need to support children and the extent to which children support parents. Social...