Projects

As the labor force ages it becomes increasingly important to analyze whether people will work longer if they live longer, and how to encourage this behavior. This will increase the productive capacity of the economy and improve the finances of…

We propose to construct a life-cycle including key determinants of married women’s labor force participation and to estimate the new formulation’s coefficients. This project would aid in understanding increased participation of married women, a dramatic trend that, due to spousal…

This research would shed light on two key labor-supply questions, namely, the effect on retirement of recent declines in DB pension plans and the cross-sectional effect on retirement of differences in late-in-career earning trajectories. Building within the analytic structure of…

Payout annuities help pool longevity risk. Prior studies focused only on fixed lifetime annuities as retirement financing tools (Dus/Maurer/Mitchell 2005); by contrast, this research analyzes both investment and longevity insurance products, recognizing that variable annuity payouts are not known for…

According to data from the Health and Retirement Study and the English Longitudinal Study on Aging, self-employment rates rise with age, and at ages 60 and older, are over 30 percent. Using variation arising from differences in retirement, employment and…

Recent SSA-supported research has demonstrated that retirement planning and well-being are closely tied to probabilistic forecasts about future events. This project will use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study to show that individuals’ subjective survival forecasts exhibit systematic…

In the past decade, many homeowners have seen their net worth increase significantly due to increasing house prices.  Given high home ownership rates among the retirement age population and the importance of home equity in their portfolios, there is significant…

We propose to forecast the retirement patterns and resources of the Early Baby-Boomers by estimating forward-looking dynamic models of labor force participation, wealth accumulation and pension and Social Security benefit claiming for older workers using seven waves of HRS-data.  The…

Data quality is an issue of longstanding concern to researchers interested in wealth accumulation. This proposal summarizes work done on some simple survey extensions—innovations that may significantly improve the quality of household economic data. An important extension is the use…

Respondent data collected in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) suggest that the trend to earlier retirement is reasserting itself among younger HRS men, after having leveled off from its historic decline over the past 15 years. In contrast, data…