Saving and Retirement

描述(由申请人提供)：这个项目分析了老年人储蓄和就业行为之间的相互关系。退休储蓄的充分性是一个对政府政策具有重要影响的问题。许多家庭没有积累足够的财富，无法在退休后维持退休前的消费水平。这经常被断言与前瞻性生命周期模型的含义不一致。然而，退休储蓄文献中的大多数研究都将退休的时间视为给定的，并分析了以退休为条件的储蓄或消费行为。就像退休时财富的广泛分散一样，退休年龄也存在广泛分散。如果耐心和休闲偏好是相关的，如果消费者对退休和储蓄都进行了选择，那么在分析储蓄行为时对退休年龄的限制可能会产生误导性的推论。这个项目将估计一个储蓄和就业行为的结构性动态模型，在这个模型中，这些决定是共同做出的。目前还没有发表的研究对这一问题采取结构性方法，但这种方法对于加深对导致所观察到的退休储蓄极端异质性的力量的理解的回报可能相当高。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project analyzes the interrelationships between saving and employment behavior at older ages. The adequacy of saving for retirement is an issue with important implications for government policy. Many households do not accumulate enough wealth to maintain their pre-retirement level of consumption following retirement. This is often asserted to be inconsistent with the implications of forward-looking life cycle models. However, most studies in the retirement-savings literature take the timing of retirement as given, and analyze saving or consumption behavior conditional on retirement. Just as there is wide dispersion in wealth at retirement, there is also wide dispersion in the age of retirement. If patience and preferences for leisure are correlated, and if consumers exercise choice over both retirement and saving, then conditioning on the age of retirement in the analysis of saving behavior could produce misleading inferences. This project will estimate a structural dynamic model of saving and employment behavior in which these decisions are made jointly. There are no published studies that take a structural approach to this problem, yet the payoff of this approach to increasing understanding of the forces leading to the observed extreme heterogeneity of saving for retirement is likely to be quite high.