2010
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…
Incorporating Heterogeneity into Default Rules for Retirement Plan Selection
This paper examines the effect of incorporating individual-level heterogeneity into default rules for retirement plan selection. We use data from a large employer that transitioned from a defined benefit (DB) plan to a defined contribution (DC) plan, offering existing employees…
2009
How Ordinary Consumers Make Complex Economic Decisions: Financial Literacy and Retirement Readiness
This paper reports on several self-assessed and objective measures of financial literacy newly added to the American Life Panel (ALP), and it links these performance measures to efforts consumers make to plan for retirement. We evaluate the causal relationship between…
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Social Security Literacy and Retirement Well-Being
We build upon the growing literature on financial literacy, which studies the prevalence of lack of knowledge about various financial issues, and propose to analyze how much people know about the Social Security rules using both a small pilot survey…
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Work Disability, Work, and Justification Bias in Europe and the U.S.
To analyze the effect of health on work, many studies use a simple self-assessed health measure based upon a question such as “do you have an impairment or health problem limiting the kind or amount of work you can do?”…
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