Estimates of differential mortality by socioeconomic status play an important role in several domains: in public policy for assessing distributional effects of public programs; in financial markets for the design of life insurance and annuities; and in individual decision making when figuring...

Individuals' subjective expectations are important in explaining heterogeneity in individual choices, but their elicitation poses challenges. In this paper, the authors present their findings from testing an innovative visual representation of an Internet survey in the context of individuals'...

Traditional economic models assume that individuals have full information and act perfectly rationally. However, we show that there is considerable variation in financial literacy in the population and propose modeling the acquisition of financial knowledge in a human capital production...

The Social Security trust fund is predicted to be depleted by 2041. While there are several viable reform proposals to restore long-term solvency of the Social Security system, one important element that is critical to the success of any reform remains unknown: how will individuals respond to,...

Little is known about the degree to which individuals are uncertain about their future Social Security benefits, how this varies within the U.S. population, and whether this uncertainty influences financial decisions related to retirement planning. To illuminate these issues, the authors present...

Early retirement appears to have a significant negative impact on the cognitive ability of people in their early 60s that is both quantitatively important and causal. We obtain this finding using cross-nationally comparable survey data from the United States, England, and Europe that allow us to...

When choosing a contraception method, women base their decisions on their subjective expectations about the realizations of method-related outcomes. Examples of outcomes include getting pregnant and contracting a sexually transmitted disease (STD). I combine innovative data on probabilistic...

We investigate the determinants of students’ university choice, with a focus on expected monetary returns, non-pecuniary factors enjoyed at school, and financial constraints, in the Pakistani context. To mitigate the identification problem concerning the separation of preferences,...