The generosity of public pensions may depress private savings and provide incentives to retire early. While there is plenty of evidence supporting the latter effect, there remains considerable controversy as whether or not public pensions crowd out private savings. This paper uses international...

The authors define and estimate measures of economic preparation for retirement based on a complete inventory of economic resources while taking into account the risk of living to advanced old age and the risk of high out-of-pocket spending for health care services. They ask whether, in a sample...

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...

According to economic theory, well-being or utility depends on consumption. However, at the household level, total consumption is rarely measured because its collection requires a great deal of survey time. As a result income has been widely used to assess economic well-being and poverty rates....

We define saving regret as the wish in hindsight to have saved more earlier in life. We measured saving regret and possible determinants in a survey of a probability sample of those aged 60-79. We investigate two main causes of saving regret: procrastination along with other psychological...

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...

Physical and cognitive abilities of older workers decline with age, which can cause a mismatch between abilities and job demands, potentially leading to early retirement. We link longitudinal Health and Retirement Study data to O*NET occupational characteristics to estimate to what extent...