Projects

Existing research comparing expectations and realizations of Social Security income suggests that many people overestimate their future retirement income. If this affects their retirement savings, it implies that people have to revise their consumption patterns in retirement and are faced…

Previous research documents the increased hazard of retirement at "conventional" retirement ages, especially the "early" and "normal" retirement ages defined by Social Security. Future public and private (employer) policies will change retirement incentives in ways that may (or may not)…

Older women tend to be in more precarious financial situations than older men, and marital status plays an important role in determining the financial well-being of older women. Understanding the underlying causes of differences in life-cycle wealth accumulation by gender…

Chile offers a unique case study of the joint functioning of a national retirement system with private accounts and a national disability insurance program with both public and private elements. The Chilean system uses a worker's retirement savings account as…

Household investment decisions crucially determine the consequences of personal accounts and the adequacy of Social Security and pensions after retirement. We propose to analyze portfolio composition dynamics before and after retirement using 1992-2002 HRS data (especially the SSA-funded user-friendly RAND…

This project will use a large-scale overlapping-generations lifecycle model incorporating idiosyncratic wage shocks and uncertain lifetimes to calculate the macroeconomic effects and efficiency gains from different approaches to creating personal accounts. The analysis will include the risk sharing aspects of…

This project seeks to study interactions among SSI, OASDI, and Medicare and Medicaid. It will use data from the HRS and SIPP, matched to SSA administrative records, to estimate individuals’ choices about SSI application. The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program…

This project will examine older Americans’ non-market time allocation using the new American Time Use Survey. It will generate results indicating: 1) How older workers spend time among market work, household production, leisure and personal care (essentially a novel accounting…

This project has two parts. First, it proposes to generalize existing retirement models to include health and employer constraints as well as worker choice. Second, it proposes to present and analyze a Social Security reform designed to promote efficiency. Specifically,…

This paper attempts to confirm the life-cycle relationship that lower subjective survival probabilities should lead to less positively sloped consumption trajectories. I use the results of six waves of subjective survival probability questions in the HRS to construct an index…