2002
UM02-10: The Retirement Elasticity: Theory and Implications
The effect of Social Security rules on the age people choose to retire can be critical in evaluating proposed changes to those rules. This research derives a theory of retirement that views retirement as a special type of labor supply…
UM02-11: Dynamic Retirement Expectations using the Health and Retirement Study
This paper tests the Rational Expectations (RE) hypothesis regarding retirement expectations, controlling for sample selection, reporting biases, and unobserved heterogeneity. We find that retirement expectations in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) are consistent with the RE hypothesis. We also…
UM02-12: Implications of High Risk Health Behaviors on Work-Force Participation: Disability, Retirement, and Lost Productivity
The effects of poor health habits on mortality have been studied extensively. However, few studies have examined the impact of these health behaviors on workforce disability. In the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative cohort of 6044 Americans who…
UM02-13: Multiple Program Use by Older Americans: Social Security, Early Retirement, and Supplemental Security Income
Features of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program and the social security retirement system interact to create incentives for prospective participants in the aged portion of SSI to withdraw from the labor force and make an early old age insurance…
UM02-C1: Welfare Reform and Immigrant Participation in the SSI Program
We examine the effect of the 1996 welfare reform legislation on participation in the Supplemental Security income (SSI) program by non-citizen immigrants. Although none of the non-citizens on the SSI rolls before welfare reform lost eligibility, the potential exists for…
UM02-C2: Representative versus Actual Lifetime Earnings Trajectories
This project explores the relationship between real-world lifetime earnings trajectories of actual workers, and several benchmark earnings paths used in Social Security policy analysis. We use the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to compare actual workers’ covered earnings profiles with…
UM02-D1: Defined Benefit Pension Plans: a Stochastic Dynamic Programming Approach
This paper employs a lifecycle model from the consumption-savings literature to examine the tradeoffs between defined benefit and defined contribution pension plans. We examine the effects of varying risk aversion, varying initial income and financial wealth, and varying wage processes…
UM02-D2: Guaranteeing Defined Contribution Pensions: the Option to Buy-back a Defined Benefit Promise
After a long commitment to defined benefit (DB) pension plans for US public sector employees, many state legislatures have introduced defined contribution (DC) plans for their public employees. In this process, investment risk, which was previously borne by state DB…
UM02-Q3: Ensuring Time-Series Consistency in Estimates of Income and Wealth
In the past decade, researchers have made substantial improvements to survey questions that allow them to obtain more accurate information from survey respondents about income and wealth. However, changing survey questions--even for the better--can create problems. For example, if we…
2001
UM01-01: Dropping Out of Social Security
The liability facing a pay-as-you-go social security system can be calculated in several ways. The exact liability measure chosen can significantly affect the conversion of a public pay-as-you-go system to a system based on individually funded accounts. Most conversions, including…