Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb Recent documents in Anthony Webb en-us Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:37:04 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/34 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/34 Tue, 06 Jan 2009 08:53:37 PST Leora Friedberg http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/33 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/33 Sun, 05 Oct 2008 15:36:29 PDT Leora Friedberg http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/32 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/32 Sun, 05 Oct 2008 15:33:30 PDT Anthony Webb http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/31 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/31 Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:58:01 PDT Most married men claim Social Security benefits at age 62 or 63, well short of both Social Security's Full Retirement Age and the age that maximizes the household's expected present value of benefits (EPVB). This results in a loss of less than 4 percent in household EPBV. But essentially the entire loss is borne by the survivor benefit, falls nearly 20 percent. As many elderly widows have very low incomes, early claiming by married men is a major social problem. Regression results found no association between early claiming and caddishness or the ability of husbands to make claiming decisions independently. The one statistically significant finding is the association of college education and later claiming, which cautiously take to indicate greater financial awareness. This suggests that an effective educational campaign might be able to raise the claiming ages of married men and improve widows' retirement income security. But financial education has not been especially effective in changing behavior. Policymakers should thus consider other initiatives to assure a survivor benefit greater than that produced by an age 62 or 63 husbands' claiming age. Such initiatives include raising the Earliest Eligibility Age, requiring spousal consent for claiming prior to the Full Retirement Age, and preserving the survivor benefit at its Full Retirement Age value and allowing the higher-earning spouse to access only a portion of his (or her) Primary Insured Amount prior to the Full Retirement Age. Steven A. Sass http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/30 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/30 Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:14:40 PDT Stress over the use of time is a hallmark of American life today. We analyze the role of bargaining in explaining how spouses divide up leisure and chores. Unlike many other outcomes of household decision-making, time use is easy to observe and assign using data from the new American Time Use Survey. The ATUS also provides a measure of the hourly wage, which is superior as a proxy for bargaining power to total earnings, used in many other studies of bargaining. We estimate the effect of a spouse's relative wages on time use during the weekend, when substitution effects of wages should be small, and controlling for household income to deal with income effects of wages. We undertake several strategies to isolate the impact of bargaining from that of specialization. In our estimation, we find significant and moderate effects on a few specific activities, including watching television and cleaning the house, and important effects on the time that individuals spend with their families, with higher relative wages reducing men's time and raising women's time with both spouse and children. However, the effects of relative wages, and hence bargaining, on overall time use appear to be quite small. This finding of minor effects implies either that wages have little effect on bargaining power; that bargaining has little effect on time use; or that the impact of wages on bargaining power is cancelled out by their impact on preferences and productivity related to time use. We note some evidence in favor of the first and second explanations. Leora Friedberg http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/29 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/29 Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:03:28 PDT Although annuities provide longevity insurance that should, in theory, be attractive to risk-averse households facing an uncertain lifespan, rates of voluntary annuitization remain extremely low. We evaluate a proposed annuity product, the Advanced Life Deferred Annuity, an annuity purchased at retirement, providing an income commencing in advanced old age. Using numerical optimization techniques, we show that this product would provide a substantial proportion of the longevity insurance provided by an immediate annuity, at a small fraction of the cost. At plausible levels of actuarial unfairness, households should prefer it to both immediate and postponed annuitization, and an optimal decumulation of unannuitized wealth. We show that few households would suffer significant losses were it used as a 401(k) plan default. Guan Gong G11, J14, J26 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/28 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/28 Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:57:10 PDT Olga Sorokina http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/27 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/27 Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:50:04 PDT Alicia H. Munnell http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/26 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/26 Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:41:04 PDT Steven A. Sass http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/25 http://works.bepress.com/anthony_webb/25 Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:27:26 PDT Francesca Golub-Sass