This program project is a coordinated analytic effort, organized around a Core of databases containing information about wealth, saving, earnings, work history and planned labor supply, consumption, family structure, health, preferences and risk aversion. The objective is to achieve a significant advance in our understanding of the wealth, saving behavior, and financial security of older households in the U.S. Analyses in this area of inquiry have been severely hampered in the past by the clear inadequacy of the available databases, a situation that has changed dramatically in the past half dozen years with the development of new and significantly higher quality data on wealth and saving. The analytic projects that use these new and markedly superior databases are concerned with three important dimensions of wealth and saving behavior: wealth held in the form of conventional financial and tangible assets, wealth held in the form of private pension rights, and wealth held in the form of rights to Social Security benefits. Project 2 focuses on special features of life- cycle models of saving, consumption and labor supply, works out the implications of health and other shocks to labor supply for the long run evolution of economic status, and examines the implications in the model of introducing heterogeneity in preferences and risk aversion. We also examine the consequences of allowing changes in preferences and risk aversion as people age, and plan to develop new and experimental measures of time preference, risk aversion, and discount rates. Project 3 is concerned with wealth held in the form of rights to private pensions and will take advantage of the unique information available in the core on the characteristics of private pension plans. Project 5 focuses on a topic of particular importance to wealth and saving behavior -- the role of bequests, inheritances, and intra-family transfers in effecting both the level of wealth, the level of saving, and the distribution of income. In all of this work, we emphasize the importance of health status and its evolution with age on work, saving, bequest and asset accumulation behavior.
| Shapiro, Matthew D; Slemrod, Joel (2009) Did the 2008 Tax Rebates Stimulate Spending? Am Econ Rev 99:374-379 |
| Kimball, Miles; Weil, Philippe (2009) Precautionary Saving and Consumption Smoothing Across Time and Possibilities. J Money Credit Bank 41:245-284 |
| Kimball, Miles S; Sahm, Claudia R; Shapiro, Matthew D (2008) Imputing Risk Tolerance From Survey Responses. J Am Stat Assoc 103:1028-1038 |
