Roth IRAs were introduced in the late 1990s and provide another option for tax-sheltered retirement savings. Because determining the benefits of a Roth IRA is a complex decision, we hypothesize that cognitive ability and having a financial planner have significant impacts on the timing and...

There is evidence that retirees are decumulating their assets very slowly or not at all. This behavior does not follow the normative framework of the life-cycle hypothesis (LCH). Decumulating in a manner that maximizes expected utility is a complex process that requires the estimation and input...

Retirees are increasingly responsible for managing their own retirement savings. The ability to manage these assets efficiently can have an important impact on retirement wellbeing. Lower levels of cognitive ability in old age can reduce an investor's ability to control emotional responses to a...

Life insurance is an important household risk management and financial tool. Policy lapsation has economic effects on life insurance companies, policyholders, and beneficiaries and the impact may be detrimental when these lapses are unexpected. Prior literature has examined several hypotheses of...

Conventional advice is to reduce risky investments as one ages. Such a generalized focus on risk avoidance may be inappropriate for elderly with longer life spans and those with financial goals that extend beyond their lifetime. To better understand risky asset holdings among the elderly, we...

This paper examines the association between stock market return expectations and financial wealth holdings of older adults using the 2016 wave of the Health and Retirement Study. Our study finds that less than 30% of individuals assigned a greater than 50% probability that the market will earn a...