During the last five decades, several social programs have been introduced to improve the well-being of the elderly. Despite these programmatic changes, there is little consensus regarding the extent to which individuals adequately prepare to finance their retirement. The adequacy of household retirement savings has been analyzed using a number of methodologies. However, there is little consensus regarding the extent to which individuals adequately prepare to finance their retirement. We propose to examine this issue using an empirical approach that differs from the prior economic literature. Specifically, we will analyze questions based on household responses to a number of subjective questions about savings preparations, expectations of future well-being, and the current well-being of retired households. A growing economic literature has shown that subjective expectations can be used to better understand economic phenomena in a variety of settings. An important advantage of this approach relative to the prior literature is that assumptions regarding the necessary savings thresholds and/or the parameters of the underlying behavioral model do not need to be made. We use a large body of information drawn from both repeated- cross sectional and panel data sets that span roughly five decades. Thus, we can examine how savings adequacy has changed over this period when programs designed to improve elderly well-being have changed dramatically. In addition, we have designed a Module which will be included in the 2006 Health and Retirement Study that will allow us to not only ask comparable questions from past surveys in a current survey, but we will also expand upon these subjective expectations questions through the use of recent techniques that elicit the distribution of perceived outcomes from respondents. ? ? ? ?
