To study the motives of savings and retirement behavior among the elderly, this project proposes to use the Health and retirement Study's (HRS) comprehensive new data to study the retirement-age group, along with data from he Survey of Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old (AHEAD) to study the 70 plus age range and data from the highly specialized TIAA-CREF survey of participants.
Our specific aim i s to study the motives of HRS respondents. We are interested in whether older households think of themselves as isolated units or as parts of webs of family-line connections - in other words, whether HRS households have accumulated pension rights and other assets to finance their own retirement and to create estates for their children and grandchildren as well, whether only the former matters to them, or, indeed, whether they expect to receive transfer from their children. The frequency and depth of intergenerational connections have implications for public policy, for the way the overall economy functions (including the degree of inequality generated), and for the behavior of individual households - a household's goals and perceptions with regard to family-line linkages theoretically will affect the amount of net work it accumulates and holds, the manner in which it arranges its portfolio, its age of retirements, how well-off it feels regardless of its private resources, and the ways it will react if public policies change.
