TODD M. SINAI, University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Email: sinai@wharton.upenn.edu
NICHOLAS S. SOULELES, University of Pennsylvania - Finance Department, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Email: Souleles@wharton.upenn.edu

This paper documents the trends in the life-cycle profiles of net worth and housing equity between 1983 and 2004. The net worth of older households significantly increased during the housing boom of recent years. However, net worth grew by more than housing equity, in part because other assets also appreciated at the same time. Moreover, the younger elderly offset rising house prices by increasing their housing debt, and used some of the proceeds to invest in other assets. We also consider how much of their housing equity older households can actually tap, using reverse mortgages. This fraction is lower at younger ages, such that young retirees can consume less than half of their housing equity. These results imply that 'consumable' net worth is smaller than standard calculations of net worth.

ROBERT L. CLARK, Affiliation Unknown
LINDA S. GHENT, Affiliation Unknown

As a result of the 1986 Age Discrimination in Employment Act, colleges and universities were no longer allowed to impose mandatory retirement on faculty members at age seventy after 1994. This paper estimates the change in retirement rates of faculty before and after the ending of mandatory retirement using data from the University of North Carolina (UNC) system. The analysis reveals a sharp decline in the probability of faculty at UNC retiring at age seventy once the university was unable to impose forced retirement.

PURVI SEVAK, Hunter College
Email: psevak@hunter.cuny.edu
LUCIE SCHMIDT, Williams College
Email: lschmidt@williams.edu

Existing literature suggests that immigrants receive lower wages than U.S. born workers with similar characteristics. This could imply that immigrant households would enter retirement at a significant financial disadvantage. In this paper, we examine the retirement resources available to immigrant families by examining Social Security benefits, pension coverage, and private wealth accumulation. Our results suggest that although immigrant families may be financially better-off in the U.S. than in their native countries, they do enter retirement at a significant financial disadvantage relative to native born households with similar characteristics.

ERIC FRENCH, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Email: eric.french@frbchi.org
JOHN BAILEY JONES, State University of New York
Email: jbjones@albany.edu

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effect of employer-provided health insurance and Medicare in determining retirement behavior. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we estimate the first dynamic programming model of retirement that accounts for both saving and uncertain medical expenses. Our results suggest that uncertainty and saving are both important. We find that workers value health insurance well in excess of its actuarial cost, and that access to health insurance has a significant effect on retirement behavior, which is consistent with the empirical evidence. As a result, shifting the Medicare eligibility age to 67 would cause a significant retirement delay - as large as the delay from shifting the Social Security normal retirement age from 65 to 67.

MARTIN FARNHAM, University of Victoria - Economics
Email: mfarnham@uvic.ca
PURVI SEVAK, Hunter College
Email: psevak@hunter.cuny.edu

We use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Office of Housing Enterprise Oversight to measure the effect of changes in housing wealth on retirement timing. Using cross-MSA variation in house-price movements to identify wealth effects on retirement timing, we find evidence that such wealth effects are present. According to some specifications the rate of transition into retirement increases in the presence of positive housing wealth shocks. In addition, we use data on expected age of retirement to measure the impact of housing wealth shocks on expectations about retirement timing. Using renters as a control for heterogeneity in local amenities and using individual fixed effects to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we find that a 10% increase in housing wealth is associated with a reduction in expected retirement age of between 3.5 and 5 months.

MICHAEL D. HURD, The RAND Corporation, SUNY at Stony Brook University, College of Arts and Science, Department of Economics, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Email: mhurd@RAND.ORG
SUSANN ROHWEDDER, The RAND Corporation
Email: Susannr@rand.org

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 puzzle. Using panel data on total spending, nondurable spending and food spending, we find that spending declines at small rates over retirement, at rates that could be explained by mechanisms such as the cessation of work-related expenses, unexpected retirement due to a health shock or by the substitution of time for spending. In the low-wealth population where spending did decline at higher rates, the main explanation for the decline appears to be a high rate of early retirement due to poor health. We conclude that at the population level there is no retirement consumption puzzle in our data, and that in subpopulations where there were substantial declines, conventional economic theory can provide the main explanation.