The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires "consumption smoothing." According to previous results based on partial spending and on synthetic panels, British and U.S. households apparently reduce consumption at retirement. The reduction cannot be explained by the simple one-good...

The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires that consumption be continuous over retirement; yet prior research based on partial measures of consumption or on synthetic panels indicates that spending drops at retirement, a result that has been called the retirement-consumption...

In this paper the authors examine the scope of cross-country variation in institutions related to social insurance. Building on the variation they find they assess the value of new micro data that is comparable across countries to help identify key parameters of individual behavior. They present...

This paper provides evidence on time-use from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a large general-purpose survey that is representative of the U.S. population age 51 and over. The data stand out for its rich set of covariates which are used to present variation in time-use by health and...

It has traditionally been believed that collecting survey measures of total spending necessarily involved asking a large number of questions, too many for inclusion of a comprehensive spending measure in a general-purpose survey. In this paper the authors report on a supplemental survey to the...

The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires "consumption smoothing." However, British and U.S. households apparently reduce consumption at retirement and the reduction cannot be explained by the life-cycle model. An interpretation is that retirees are surprised by the inadequacy...

We estimate the effect of expectations about unemployment on household spending using high-frequency panel data from the RAND American Life Panel. The data were collected during the Great Recession and its aftermath, a time of great economic uncertainty. We use monthly data both on total...

Besides compensation and financial incentives, several other work-related factors may affect individual retirement decisions. Specifically, job characteristics such as autonomy, skill variety, task significance and difficulty, stress and physical demands, peer pressure and relations with...

We studied how households adjust their spending in response to the financial crisis. Based on five waves of data from the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey, we quantified the reduction in total consumption and in specific categories of consumption in the older population at large and by...

Background: The fact that many individuals inexplicably fail to buy stocks, despite the historical evidence for a good return on investment has been referred to as the stock market puzzle. However, measurements of the subjective probability of a gain show that people are more pessimistic than...