2005
Saving Shortfalls and Delayed Retirement
WP 2005-094 , UM04-C1
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…
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Using a Structural Retirement Model to Simulate the Effect of Changes to the OASDI and Medicare Programs
RB 2005-075 , UM04-06
In this paper, we specify a dynamic programming model that addresses the interplay among health, financial resources, and the labor market behavior of men in the later part of their working lives. The model is estimated using data from the…
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Grasshoppers, Ants and Pre-Retirement Wealth: A Test of Permanent Income Consumers
RB 2005-072 , UM04-S1
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…
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Global Aging: Issues, Answers, and More Questions
WP 2005-068 , UM04-Q1
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…
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Betting on Death and Capital Markets in Retirement: A Shortfall Risk Analysis of Life Annuities versus Phased Withdrawal Plans
RB 2005-053 , UM04-12
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…
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Obesity, Disability, and Movement Onto the Disability Insurance Rolls
WP 2005-073 , UM04-08
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…
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Does Social Security Privatization Produce Efficiency Gains?
WP 2005-106 , UM05-15
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…
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Technological Progress and Worker Productivity at Different Ages
WP 2005-107 , UM05-04
Economists have long thought of technological progress as a primary determinant of rising living standards over time. One might think of technological progress as increasing the "effectiveness" of labor, thereby raising the amount of output that each unit of labor…
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Financial Literacy and Planning: Implications for Retirement Wellbeing
WP 2005-108 , UM05-09
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,…
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Gender, Marriage, and Asset Accumulation in the United States
WP 2005-109 , UM05-12
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…
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