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Working Paper
Using subjective expectations to forecast longevity: do survey respondents know something we don't know?
Future old-age mortality is notoriously difficult to predict because it requires not only an understanding of the process of senescence, which is influenced by genetic, environmental and behavioral factors, but also a prediction of how these factors will evolve going forward. In this paper, I argue that individuals are uniquely qualified to predict their own mortality based on their own genetic background, as well as environmental and behavioral risk factors that are often known only to the individual. Using expectations data from the 1992 HRS, I construct subjective cohort life tables that ...
Discussion Paper
Funding Agreement-Backed Securities in the Enhanced Financial Accounts
This note describes new data on funding agreement-backed securities (FABS) that is being provided as part of the Enhanced Financial Accounts (EFA) initiative.
Discussion Paper
Accounting for Mortgage Charge-Offs in the Financial Accounts of the United States
The level of outstanding home mortgage debt in the United States has declined about $1.5 trillion, or 13 percent, since its peak six years ago. This large drop in mortgage debt has been the primary driver of the reduction in household liabilities often referred to as "household deleveraging" and frequently measured by statistics such as aggregate household debt relative to income.
Working Paper
Wealth effects and the consumption of leisure: retirement decisions during the stock market boom of the 1900s
It is well accepted that households increase consumption of goods and services in response to an unexpected increase in wealth. Consensus estimates of this wealth effect are in the range of 3 to 5 cents of additional consumption spending in the long run for each additional dollar of wealth. Economic theory also suggests that consumption of leisure, like consumption of goods and services, should increase with positive shocks to wealth. In this paper, we ask whether the run-up in equity prices during the 1990s led older workers to retire earlier than they had previously planned. We identify the ...
Working Paper
Escaping the Samaritan's Dilemma: implications of a dynamic model of altruistic intergenerational transfers
This paper explores how altruistic parents structure transfer rules in response to potential incentive problems and how the investment behavior of children is influenced by these transfer policies. To investigate these issues, I develop a dynamic model of altruistic transfers in which transfers can be tied to the purchase of human capital investment. Numerical solutions are examined to provide insight into the predictions of the model for transfer behavior and investment by family size. The dynamic framework developed in the paper is used to guide the interpretation of data on transfers and ...
Discussion Paper
Funding Agreement-Backed Securities in the Financial Accounts of the United States
This note describes a new method of accounting for funding agreement-backed securities (FABS) in the Financial Accounts of the United States.