The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), national health reform passed in 2010, is intended to expand health insurance coverage to near-universal levels. While unprecedented on the national level, a similar reform was implemented in Massachusetts in 2006. The Massachusetts health reform and the PPACA are nearly identical in their key elements.

Millions of unorganized and informal sector workers in the developing world are excluded from formal pension and social security systems. Old-age economic security is a pertinent problem for such population groups and providing adequate and secure income flows in the future is a formidable challenge.

First, the demand for insurance in rural economies is complex and not well understood. Rural households face a number of significant risks, one of the most important being crop failure from drought or excessive rain. When these events occur, common coping mechanisms such as informal insurance, credit or increased labor supply are not effective because the shock adversely affects all households in a given region. In theory, these households can obtain insurance for weather-related shocks by accessing larger financial markets.

Population aging has put a fiscal strain on the Social Security system of many countries. One of the main policy responses has been to move from a Defined Benefit (DB) to a Defined Contribution (DC) Social Security system. How this change would affect saving and labor supply is crucial for evaluating the desirability of such a reform. While there is substantial existing work on how the size of Social Security benefits impacts economic outcomes (e.g.

Income risk is arguably the largest source of risk people face and may carry substantial welfare costs. Income volatility, defined as the variance of squared income changes, can be used to measure income risk. There has been a great deal of recent interest in the evolution of income volatility (Dahl, DeLeire, and Schwabish, 2007; Dynan, Elmendorf, and Sichel, 2007; Gottschalk and Moffitt, 1994, 2002; Hacker, 2006). A popular conclusion of this research is that income changes have gotten larger over time.

The proposed research will study the importance of health insurance availability in the decision of whether to annuitize wealth at the time of retirement. Recent research has suggested that uninsured medical expenses among the elderly may contribute to the under-annuitization puzzle, but there is no direct evidence on this question. We propose to study how the annuitization decision of retirees may be affected by Medigap insurance coverage. Our first contribution is therefore to provide direct evidence on the causal effect of insurance coverage on annuitization.

The proposed reserach will evaluate what role financial advisers can play in the context of a lifecycle portfolio choice model.  Previous efforts have focused on optimal portfolio allocation patterns for a rational forward-looking consumer who must decide on her own how to allocate her accruals between stocks and bonds.  The proposed paper will add several new features to the basic model to explore why and when a financial adviser might be optimally brought in to help the consumer manager her portfolio.  The first innovation is to allow for portfolio adjustment costs which ma

This TRIO will lay the groundwork for a NIA competitive renewal application in 2010 that will be directed towards evaluating the medium‐ and longer‐run impacts of important dimensions of the 2008 Chilean Pension Reform. These changes were not anticipated or covered by the current grant when it was developed in 2003‐4. In particular, the proposed TRIO project will: (1) Characterize the relevant details and time lines of the multiple components of the 2008 Reform.

Compulsory annuitization is often proposed as a compelling solution under defined-contribution pension schemes to help plan participants manage their longevity risk. This paper explores the current annuity market in Singapore and discusses the pros and cons of a proposal to mandate annuitization under the Singaporean national pension system -- the Central Provident Fund (CPF).

This paper develops a consumption and portfolio-choice model of a retiree who allocates wealth among four assets: a riskless bond, a risky asset, a real annuity, and housing. Unlike previous studies that treat health expenditures as exogenous negative income shocks, this paper builds on the Grossman model to endogenize health expenditures as investments in health. I calibrate the model to explain the joint evolution of health status and the composition of wealth for retirees, aged 65 to 96, in the Health and Retirement Study.