Saving and Retirement

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目分析老年人储蓄与就业行为之间的相互关系。退休储蓄是否充足是一个对政府政策有重要影响的问题。许多家庭在退休后没有积累足够的财富来维持退休前的消费水平。这通常被认为与前瞻性生命周期模型的含义不一致。然而，大多数退休储蓄文献的研究都将退休时间作为给定的，并分析以退休为条件的储蓄或消费行为。正如退休时财富的巨大差异一样，退休年龄也存在巨大差异。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有选择，那么在对储蓄行为的分析中，以退休年龄为条件可能会产生误导性的推论。本项目将估计储蓄和就业行为的结构动态模型，其中这些决策是共同做出的。目前还没有发表的研究采用结构性的方法来解决这个问题，然而，这种方法的回报可能是相当高的，因为它增加了对导致观察到的退休储蓄极端异质性的力量的理解。

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.