2005 – Publication Years

Does Social Security Privatization Produce Efficiency Gains?

June 14, 2018
Labor Supply, Social Security

While privatizing Social Security can improve labor supply incentives, it can also reduce risk sharing when households face uninsurable risks. We simulate a stylized 50-percent privatization using an overlapping-generations model where heterogeneous agents with elastic labor supply face idiosyncratic earnings…

Obesity, Disability, and Movement Onto the Disability Insurance Rolls

June 14, 2018
Disability, Disability insurance, Health

Between the early 1980s and 2002, both the prevalence of obesity and the number of beneficiaries of the Social Security Disability Insurance program doubled. We test whether these trends are related; specifically, we test whether obesity causes disability and movement…

Gender, Marriage, and Asset Accumulation in the United States

June 14, 2018
Family dynamics, Life-cycle model

Wealth accumulation has important implications for the relative well-being of households. In this paper, we describe how household wealth in the United States varies by gender and family type. We find evidence of large differences in observed wealth between single-female-headed…

Financial Literacy and Planning: Implications for Retirement Wellbeing

June 14, 2018
Financial well-being, Retirement, retirement savings

Only a minority of American households feels “confident” about retirement saving adequacy, and little is known about why people fail to plan for retirement, and whether planning and information costs might affect retirement saving patterns. To better understand these issues,…

Grasshoppers, Ants and Pre-Retirement Wealth: A Test of Permanent Income Consumers

June 14, 2018
Retirement

This paper shows that households who enter retirement with low wealth consistently followed non-permanent income consumption rules during their working years. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), household wealth in 1989 is predicted for a sample of 50-65…

Global Aging: Issues, Answers, and More Questions

June 14, 2018
International, Labor Supply

Global aging will be a major determinant of long run economic development in industrial and developing countries. The extent of the demographic changes is dramatic and will deeply affect future labor, financial and goods markets. The expected strain on public…

Betting on Death and Capital Markets in Retirement: A Shortfall Risk Analysis of Life Annuities versus Phased Withdrawal Plans

June 14, 2018
Retirement

How might retirees consider deploying the retirement assets accumulated in a defined contribution pension plan? One possibility would be to purchase an immediate annuity. Another approach, called the “phased withdrawal” strategy in the literature, would have the retiree invest his…

Changes in Consumption and Activities in Retirement

June 14, 2018
Life-cycle model, Retirement

The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires “consumption smoothing.” According to previous results based on partial spending and on synthetic panels, British and U.S. households apparently reduce consumption at retirement. The reduction cannot be explained by the simple one-good…

The Impact of Health Status and Out-of-Pocket Medical Expenditures on Annuity Valuation

June 14, 2018
Health, Retirement

This paper describes how differences in health status at retirement can influence the decision to purchase a life annuity. We extend previous research on annuitization decisions by incorporating the effect of health differentials via differences in survival throughout the latter…

Saving Shortfalls and Delayed Retirement

June 14, 2018
Health and Retirement Study, Retirement

Prior research has suggested that many older Americans have not saved enough to maintain consumption levels in old age. One way older persons might respond to inadequate savings would be to extend their worklives by delaying retirement. This paper examines…