Susann Rohwedder is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, associate director of the RAND Center for the Study of Aging, and an affiliate member of the faculty of the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her research focuses on the economics of aging in the areas of household consumption and saving behavior, retirement, and expectation formation. She has written on the impact of pension reforms on household saving in the UK; the adequacy of retirement resources of U.S. households near retirement; the effect of retirement on cognitive ability; spending and saving patterns among the older population; consumption- and income-based poverty measures at older ages; and individuals' expectations about future Social Security benefits and longevity. Other papers deal with data quality and survey methods. She is currently leading the collection of high-frequency household data to assess and track the effects of the Great Recession. Several of Rohwedder's research activities have an international dimension: She participated in an international savings comparison project; has ongoing work comparing saving and retirement across the United States and several European countries; and participated in the European Research Training Network on the “Economics of Ageing in Europe” and is a research fellow of NETSPAR (Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging, and Retirement) in the Netherlands. Rohwedder holds master's degrees from the University of Warwick (UK) and the Sorbonne in Paris and a Ph.D. in economics from University College London.
Articles
Mental Retirement (with Robert Willis), Journal of Economic Perspectives (2010)
Early retirement appears to have a significant negative impact on the cognitive ability of people...
Pension Wealth and Household Saving: Evidence from Pension Reforms in the United Kingdom (with Orazio Attanasio), THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW (2003)
Using three major U.K. pension reforms as natural experiments we investigate the relationship between pension...
Unpublished Papers
Effects of the Financial Crisis and Great Recession on American Households (with Michael D. Hurd), NBER working paper No. 16407 (2010)
In this paper we present evidence from high-frequency data collections dedicated to tracking the effects...
The Effect of the Risk of Out-of-Pocket Spending for Health Care on Economic Preparation for Retirement (with Michael D. Hurd), MRRC Working Paper No. 2010-232 (2010)
After retirement, the primary sources of uncertainty with respect to an individual’s economic status are...
The Effects of the Economic Crisis on the Older Population (with Michael D. Hurd), Michigan Retirement Research Center Working Paper 2010-231 (2010)
We study the effects of the 2007-2009 recession on the population age 55 and older....
The Displacement Effect of Public Pensions on the Accumulation of Financial Assets (with Michael D. Hurd and Pierre-Carl Michaud), MRRC Working Paper, WP 2009-212 (2009)
The generosity of public pensions may depress private savings and provide incentives to retire early....
Individuals’ Responses to Social Security Reform (with Adeline Delavande), MRRC-Working Paper No. 2008-182 (2008)
The Social Security trust fund is predicted to be depleted by 2041. While there are...