2007
Financial Literacy and Retirement Planning: New Evidence from the Rand American Life Panel
WP 2007-157 , UM07-10
The present paper introduces a new dataset, the Rand American Life Panel (ALP), which offers several appealing features for an analysis of financial literacy and retirement planning. It allows us to evaluate financial knowledge during workers’ prime earning years…
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Subjective Survival Probabilities in the Health and Retirement Study: Systematic Biases and Predictive Validity
WP 2007-159 , UM07-19
Recent research has demonstrated that retirement planning and well-being are closely tied to probabilistic forecasts about future events. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, I show that individuals’ subjective survival forecasts exhibit systematic biases relative to life…
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Children and Household Wealth
WP 2007-158 , UM07-12
This paper examines the effects of children on consumption and wealth. To anchor intuition, we develop implications using a simple permanent income model with no uncertainty and complete markets. But this framework does not come close to matching the distribution…
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The Impact of Private Participation on Disability Costs: Evidence from Chile
WP 2007-161 , UM07-14
Social security systems in many countries face problems of high and escalating disability costs. This paper analyzes how disability costs have been controlled in Chile. The disability insurance system in Chile is much less well-known than the pension part,…
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Are 401(k) Saving Rates Changing? Cohort/Period Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study
WP 2007-160 , UM07-05
This research examines the determinants of eligibility and participation in 401(k) plans using two cross-sections of data from the Health and Retirement Study. Our sample consists of workers ages 51-56 representing two cohorts: the original HRS cohort born 1931-41, first…
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Financial Literacy and Stock Market Participation
WP 2007-162
Individuals are increasingly put in charge of their financial security after retirement. Moreover, the supply of complex financial products has increased considerably over the years. However, we still have little or no information about whether individuals have the financial knowledge…
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Future Beneficiary Expectations of the Returns to Delayed Social Security Benefit Claiming and Choice Behavior
WP 2007-164 , UM07-01
We report on our preliminary findings from an innovative module of survey questions in the RAND American Life Panel designed to measure willingness to delay take-up of Social Security benefits. Among respondents who expect to stop working full time prior…
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Estimating the Health Effects of Retirement
WP 2007-168 , UM07-08
We estimate the magnitude of any direct effect of retirement on health. Since retirement is endogenous to heath, it is not possible to estimate this effect by comparing the health of individuals before and after they retire. As an alternative…
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The Effects of Health Insurance and Self-Insurance on Retirement Behavior
WP 2007-170 , UM07-13
This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effect of employer-provided health insurance and Medicare in determining retirement behavior. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we estimate the first dynamic programming model of retirement that accounts for both…
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Burnout and the Retirement Decision
WP 2007-166 , UM07-03
We introduce the process of psychological burnout and recovery as an explanation for the phenomenon known as unretirement. We illustrate theoretically how predictable time variation in burnout could generate retirement and subsequent re-entry in a standard retirement model. We apply…
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