Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios ...

This paper investigates whether exchanging the Social Security delayed retirement credit, currently paid as an increase in lifetime annuity benefits, for a lump sum would induce later claiming and additional work. We show ...

People who delay claiming Social Security receive higher lifelong benefits upon retirement. We survey individuals on their willingness to delay claiming later, if they could receive a lump sum in lieu of a higher annuity ...

We designed and fielded an experimental module in the 2014 HRS which seeks to measure older persons’ willingness to voluntarily defer claiming of Social Security benefits. In addition we evaluate the stated willingness of ...

A number of recent studies have concluded that consumer spending patterns over the month are closely linked to the timing of income receipt. This correlation is interpreted as evidence of hyperbolic discounting. I re-examine ...

Job security is important for durable consumption and household savings. Using surveys, workers express a probability that they will lose their job in the next 12 months. In order to assess the empirical content of these ...

We extend the canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk to shock distributions with left-skewness and excess kurtosis, to which we refer as higher- order risk. We estimate our extended income process by ...

We study risk taking in a panel of subjects in Wuhan, China - before, during the COVID-19 crisis, and after the country reopened. Subjects in our sample traveled for semester break in January, generating variation in ...

The DNB Household Survey (DHS) offers a unique collection of data that allows the study of both psychological and economic aspects of financial behavior; a panel study among 2000 households that has been active since 1993. ...

The American Community Survey (ACS) helps local officials, community leaders, and businesses understand the changes taking place in their communities. It is the premier source for detailed population and housing information ...