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Working Paper
Reverse mortgage loans: a quantitative analysis
Supersedes Working Paper 13-27. Reverse mortgage loans (RMLs) allow older homeowners to borrow against housing wealth without moving. Despite growth in this market, only 2.1% of eligible homeowners had RMLs in 2011. In this paper, the authors analyze reverse mortgages in a calibrated life-cycle model of retirement. The average welfare gain from RMLs is $885 per homeowner. The authors? model implies that low-income, low-wealth, and poor-health households benefit the most, consistent with empirical evidence. Bequest motives, nursing-home-move risk, house price risk, and loan costs all ...
Working Paper
Medical Expenses and Saving in Retirement: The Case of U.S. and Sweden
Many U.S. households have significant wealth late in life, contrary to the predictions of a simple life-cycle model. In this paper, we document stark differences between U.S. and Sweden regarding out-of-pocket medical and long-term-care expenses late in life, and use them to investigate their role in discouraging the elderly from dissaving. Using a consumption-saving model in retirement with significant uninsurable expense risk, we find that medical expense risk accounts for a quarter of the U.S.-Sweden difference in retirees' dissaving patterns. Furthermore, medical expense risk affects ...
Working Paper
A model of money and credit, with application to the credit card debt puzzle
Many individuals simultaneously have significant credit card debt and money in the bank. The credit card debt puzzle is: given high interest rates on credit cards and low rates on bank accounts, why not pay down debt? While some economists go to elaborate lengths to explain this, we argue it is a special case of the rate-of-return-dominance puzzle from monetary economics. We extend standard monetary theory to incorporate consumer debt, which is interesting in its own right since developing models where money and credit coexist is a long-standing challenge. Our model is quite tractable?e.g., ...
Working Paper
Reverse mortgage loans: a quantitative analysis
Reverse mortgage loans (RMLs) allow older homeowners to borrow against housing wealth without moving. In spite of growth in this market, only 2.1% of eligible homeowners had RMLs in 2011. In this paper, we analyze reverse mortgages in a life-cycle model of retirement, calibrated to age-asset profiles. The ex-ante welfare gain from RMLs is sizable at $1,000 per household; ex-post, low-income, low-wealth and poor-health households use them. Bequest motives, nursing-home moving risk, house price risk, and interest and insurance costs all contribute to the low take-up rate. The model predicts ...
Working Paper
Home Equity in Retirement
Retired homeowners dissave more slowly than renters, which suggests that homeownership a?ects retirees? saving decisions. We investigate empirically and theoretically the life-cycle patterns of homeownership, housing and nonhousing assets in retirement. Using an estimated structural model of saving and housing decisions, we ?nd, ?rst, that homeowners dissave slowly because they prefer to stay in their house as long as possible but cannot easily borrow against it. Second, the 1996-2006 housing boom signi?cantly increased homeowners? assets. These channels are quantitatively signi?cant; without ...
Working Paper
Home equity withdrawal in retirement
The authors study empirically and theoretically the patterns of home equity withdrawal among retirees, using a model in which retirees are able to own or rent a home, save, and borrow against home equity, in the face of idiosyncratic risks concerning mortality, health, medical expenditures, and household size and observed house price changes. The estimated model is found to successfully replicate the patterns of homeownership and the saving/borrowing decisions of retirees. They use the estimated model for several counterfactual experiments. There are three main findings. First, the model ...