Over the last decade or so, a substantial effort has gone into the design of a series of methodological investigations aimed at enhancing the quality of survey data on income and wealth. These investigations have largely been conducted at the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan,...

Over the last decade or so, a substantial effort has gone into the design of a series of methodological investigations aimed at enhancing the quality of survey data on income and wealth. These investigations have largely been conducted at the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan,...

This article models respondent behavior in a financial survey with a framework explicitly integrating a respondent's knowledge of and willingness to reveal his or her financial status. Whether a respondent provides a valid answer, a quot;don't knowquot;, or a quot;refusalquot; to a financial...

This study analyzes the extent to which an individual's survival expectations influence his or her decision to claim social security benefits at an early age. We find that subjective survival probabilities capture meaningful behavioral responses to incentives for early Social Security claiming...

We have found modest effects of widowhood events on loss of health insurance. There are also modest effects of widowhood on labor supply, which we have not as yet attempted to attribute to insurance demand. Even new widowhood events, however, are not random with respect to initial conditions....

We develop a model of portfolio selection with subjective uncertainty and learning in order to explain why some people hold stocks while others don't. We model heterogeneity in information directly, which is an alternative to the existing explanations that emphasized heterogeneity in transaction...

We analyzed the economic consequences of a husband's death using events that occurred between the first two waves of the HRS and AHEAD studies. We compared poverty transitions against published results from Social Security's Retirement History Survey of the 1970s. Widowhood remains an important...

Objectives: Little is known regarding the amount of time spent by unpaid caregivers providing help to elderly individuals for disabilities associated with diabetes mellitus (DM). We sought to obtain nationally representative estimates of the time, and associated cost, of informal caregiving...

This paper utilizes a large set of subjective probability questions from the Health and Retirement Survey to construct an index measuring the precision of probabilistic beliefs (PPB) and relates this index to household choices about the riskiness of their portfolios and the rate of growth of...

This study analyzes the role of individual's and spouse's survival expectations and knowledge about Social Security rules on the expected Social Security claiming age, taking into account the various incentives single and married individuals face. There is substantial heterogeneity in the level...