Saving Shortfalls and Delayed Retirement

Andrew Au, Olivia Mitchell and John W.R. Phillips
Additional contact information
Andrew Au: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
John W.R. Phillips: National Institute on Aging

Working Papers from University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center

Abstract: Prior research has suggested that many older Americans have not saved enough to maintain consumption levels in old age. One way older persons might respond to inadequate savings would be to extend their worklives by delaying retirement. This paper examines evidence on this matter using the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative panel survey of people age 51-61 in 1992 followed for several years in a panel. We use the data to project household retirement assets and to determine how much more saving would be needed to preserve post-retirement consumption levels. Our research then examines the links between derived saving shortfall measures and delayed retirement patterns. Among nonmarried persons, there is evidence that larger shortfalls do produce delayed retirement, though the effect is not quantitatively large. For married couples, pre-retirement wealth shortfalls do not appear to be significantly associated with delayed retirement. Evidently couples have other means of handling saving shortfalls.

Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2005-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp094.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp094.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://mrdrc.isr.umich.edu/publications/Papers/pdf/wp094.pdf)

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mrr:papers:wp094

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center P.O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MRRC Administrator ().