UM10-11: Financial Literacy, Short-run Impatience, and the Determinants of Savings and Financial Management
Two competing explanations for why consumers have trouble with financial decisions are gaining momentum. The first is that people are financially illiterate, lacking the skills needed to calculate expected returns or present discounted values which may cause them to make…
UM10-12: Financial Knowledge And Financial Literacy At The Household Level
Financial preparation for retirement is a household decision. Measures of imperfect knowledge about pensions and Social Security can be constructed with data from the Health and Retirement Study, including frequencies of don’t know responses, resort to brackets instead of continuous…
UM10-13: Personality, Lifetime Earnings, and Retirement Wealth
Lifetime earnings vary widely, even controlling for education. Households vary widely in their retirement wealth, even when controlling for lifetime income (Venti and Wise, 1998). The role of conscientiousness and other personality traits as independent factors in labor market outcomes…
UM10-14: New HRS Data on Intergenerational Transfers
Although it has found wide use in analysis of Social Security and other policies, the life-cycle model of household behavior overlooks connections within family lines that may considerably affect the well-being of both young and old households. This proposal would…
UM10-15: Geographic dispersion and the well-being of the elderly
The rising cost of medical care, especially long-term care, poses serious budgetary challenges in the context of an aging population. The majority of long-term care is currently provided by adult children, likely affecting their labor supply. Absent this support, the…
UM10-16: Bequest Motives and Asset Decumulation at the End of Life
The proposed research would examine how out-of-pocket medical expenses and bequest motives affect the saving of elderly singles. It will use data from the Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old (AHEAD) dataset to estimate a dynamic programming model…
UM10-17: Post-Retirement Adjustments in Defined Benefit Pensions
Few private defined benefit pension plans index benefits after a worker begins receiving them. Previous (now dated) research finds that most plans do, nonetheless, make “voluntary” adjustments, which compensate for roughly 40% of the price increases after retirement. This project…
UM10-18: The Effect of Out-of-Pocket Spending for Health Care on Economic Preparation for Retirement
In research previously funded by the Social Security Administration through MRRC, we estimated the fraction of households aged 65-69 who were adequately prepared for retirement by finding whether their economic resources could sustain an empirically estimated life-cycle consumption path. The…
UM10-19: New Explorations of Health and Wealth
We explore the role of health shocks on wealth and retirement income. Several recent contributions to the literature emphasize that precautionary saving in response to health uncertainty plays a critical role in understanding age-asset profiles of households. These studies assume…
UM10-20: Cognitive Skills, Numeracy and Retiree Health Care Expenditure
The well-being of retirees with lower cognitive ability and numeracy is at greater risk because they have lower incomes yet higher medical expenditures. Linking HRS data to administrative records, we will evaluate two hypotheses about why this group spends more…