In the current structure of the U.S. residential mortgage market, a fall in property values may make it very difficult for homeowners to refinance their mortgages to take advantage of falling interest rates. In this paper, we explain the institutional background for this effect and quantify its...

Mortgage applications are a detailed and accurate source of household information that is verified by underwriters, making it a more accurate data source than self-reported survey answers. This paper discusses how mortgage data can be applied to areas of economics outside mortgage finance. As a...

This paper investigates the responsiveness of individuals' retirement expectations to forward-looking measures of pension wealth accumulations. While most of the existing literature on retirement has used cross-sectional variation to identify the effects of pension and Social Security wealth on...

This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the employment and retirement behavior of men aged fifty and above who have experienced an involuntary job loss. Hazard models for returning to work and for exiting post-displacement employment are estimated and used to examine...

We use the Health and Retirement Study to examine the effects of job loss on factors affecting retirement incentives, including earnings, assets and pensions. We then estimate models of the retirement decision, which take into account the incentive to retire and any additional effects of...

This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the...

When choice options are complex, policy makers may seek to reduce decision making errors by making a high quality option the default. We show that this positive effect is at risk because such a policy creates incentives for decision makers to "drop out" by paying no attention to the decision and...

Older wealthholders spend down assets slowly. To study this pattern, the paper introduces health dependent utility into a model in which different preferences for bequests, expenditures when in need of long-term care (LTC), and ordinary consumption combine with health and longevity uncertainty...

This paper introduces the Vanguard Research Initiative (VRI), a new panel survey of wealthholders designed to yield high-quality measurements of a large sample of older Americans who arrive at retirement with significant financial assets. The VRI links survey data with a variety of...

Popularity is self reinforcing. The attention garnered by popular options propels further interest in them. Yet rather than blindly follow the crowd, most pay attention to how well these items match their tastes. We model this role of social learning in guiding selective attention and market...