New Retirement Research (July 30 2018)

Here are some of the latest reports, surveys, and studies related to retirement, including research on household behavioral finance and Social Security claiming strategies for working families.

How do households allocate resources across time and around the world? Which financial products and strategies do households use? How can firms and governments design products, interventions, and regulations to influence household financial outcomes? How do all of these factors affect household welfare?

These are the questions researchers seek to answer in the working paper titled Behavioral Household Finance, from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The authors of this paper say it represents a chapter from the forthcoming 1st Handbook of Behavioral Economics, Vol. 1, and provides an overview of household finance. The first part summarizes key facts regarding household financial behavior, emphasizing empirical regularities that are inconsistent with the standard classical economic model and discussing extensions of the classical model and explanations grounded in behavioral economics that can account for the observed patterns. This part covers five topics: consumption and savings, borrowing, payments, asset allocation, and insurance. The second part addresses interventions that firms, governments, and other parties deploy to shape household financial outcomes: education and information, peer effects and social influence, product design, advice and disclosure, choice architecture, and interventions that directly target prices or quantities.

More of the latest studies, papers and research of interest to those saving for and living in retirement:

U.S. National Center for Health Statistics: Deaths: Leading Causes for 2016 and Deaths: Final Data for 2016

Center for Retirement Research at Boston College: Is the Drop in Fertility Temporary or Permanent?

U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging: Supporting Economic Stability and Self-Sufficiency as Americans with Disabilities and their Families Age

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Medicare Improperly Paid Providers for Nonemergency Ambulance Transports to Destinations Not Covered by Medicare

Public Library of Science: Wishes and needs of community-dwelling older persons concerning general practice: A qualitative study

Population Reference Bureau: Today's Research on Aging

Urban Institute: Housing an Aging Region: Southeast Michigan Housing Futures, Brief 1

NBER: The Sad Truth About Happiness Scales: Empirical Results

SSRN: Behavioral Finance, Decumulation and the Regulatory Strategy for Robo-Advice

SSRN: Social Security Retirement Benefits: A Timing Model for Working Families

SSRN: Intergenerational Altruism and Transfers of Time and Money: A Life-Cycle Perspective

Australia Institute of Health and Welfare: Healthy Communities: Coordination of health care - experiences with GP care among patients aged 45 and over, 2016

University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center: Aging, Depression, Non-Communicable Diseases and Disabilities in South Africa

Institute for the Study of Labor: Working Beyond 65 in Ireland and The Role of Self-Employment in Ireland's Older Workforce

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