What Makes Retirees Happy?

Keith A. Bender () and Natalia A. Jivan ()
Additional contact information
Natalia A. Jivan: Center for Retirement Research at Boston College
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Natalia Zhivan ()

Issues in Brief from Center for Retirement Research

Abstract: Economic well-being in retirement has been of increasing interest for economic researchers. The policy implications are large. As the baby boom generation nears retirement, understanding the factors that determine economic well-being enables policymakers to evaluate and possibly reform present retirement institutions, such as public and private pension programs. Of particular interest in this field has been the focus on retirement income adequacy, that is, the financial resources retirees need to be above some minimal level. While this area of research is important, focusing on just the economic well-being of individuals may miss other factors that influence overall welfare. Indeed, there has been a lack of research on other aspects of well-being for retirees in the economics literature. This brief attempts to fill this void by examining the determinants of the overall well-being of retirees, using the 2000 Health and Retirement Study. The brief is organized as follows. The next section reviews the economics literature on well-being measures. The second section explains the data used in the analysis presented in this brief, while the third section reviews the results. A final section summarizes the study and offers areas of future research.

Keywords: retirement; baby boomers; income; well-being; retiree; satisfaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-pbe
Date: 2005-02
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://crr.bc.edu/images/stories/Briefs/ib_28.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: What Makes Retirees Happy? (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crr:issbrf:ib28

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Issues in Brief from Center for Retirement Research
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christopher F Baum ().