Projects

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 households. The…

Abstract from first paper: Germany still has a very generous public pay-as-you-go pension system. It is characterized by early effective retirement ages and very high effective replacement rates. Most workers receive virtually all of their retirement income from this public…