We find that most husbands claim Social Security before the ages that maximize the expected present value of their benefits. Although household benefits are only slightly reduced, the expected present value of widows’ benefits reduces by 17.7%, increasing their risk of poverty.

A considerable literature examines the optimal decumulation of financial wealth in retirement. We extend this research to incorporate housing, which comprises the majority of most households’ non-pension wealth.We estimate the relationship between the returns on housing, stocks, and bonds, and...

Retired households must trade off the risk of outliving their wealth against the cost of unnecessarily restricting their consumption. Using numerical optimisation techniques, we compare two innovative rules of thumb: (1) consuming the age-related percentage of remaining wealth specified in the...

This paper explores the productivity differential between return migrants (“Sea Turtles”) and non-migrants through a case study of China’s venture capital (VC) industry. I find that even after correcting for selection bias, return venture capitalists are less productive than comparable...