2010
How Do Long-Run Financial Planning Expectations and Decisions Respond to Short-Run Fluctuations in Financial Markets?
While media reports predicted substantial changes in labor supply behavior due to the sharp decline in the value of the stock market in October 2008, empirical evidence on the relationship between equity markets and retirement is mixed. We use panel…
Special Session: Information on Data.Gov: Data in the Open Government Environment
Slides only, no abstract available.
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Cognitive Ability and Retiree Health Care Expenditure
Slides only, no abstract available.
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The Asset Cost of Poor Health
This paper examines the correlation between poor health and asset accumulation for households in the first nine waves of the Health and Retirement Survey. Rather than enumerating the specific costs of poor health, such as out of pocket medical expenses…
Medicaid Crowd-Out of Long-Term Care Insurance with Endogenous Medicaid Enrollment
With states facing tightening Medicaid budgets, the high cost of financing long-term care for the elderly through Medicaid has prompted proposals to make private long-term care insurance (LTCI) more affordable through tax incentives. The effectiveness of tax incentives for stimulating…
The Treatment of Married Women by the Social Security Retirement Program
It is generally accepted that the Social Security program pays to women a higher average ratio of lifetime benefits to lifetime taxes than it does to men. Social Security’s progressive benefit structure and payment of benefits as an annuity combine…
Personality, Lifetime Earnings, and Retirement Wealth
The Health and Retirement Study (HRS) presents an unparalleled opportunity to study the association of personality with lifetime economic success. The linkage of HRS survey data with administrative data from the Social Security Administration allows us to look at well-measured…
Accounting for non-annuitization
Why don't people buy annuities? Several explanations have been provided by the previous literature: large fraction of preannuitized wealth in retirees' portfolios; adverse selection; bequest motives; and medical expense uncertainty. This paper uses a quantitative model to assess the importance…
State Wage-Payment Laws, the Pension Protection Act of 2006, and 401(k) Saving Behavior
I show that state wage-payment laws, which forbid deductions from wages and salaries without the written permission of the employee, constituted a binding constraint on firms’ choices to adopt automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans prior to 2006. Since the passage…