Cognitive decline and household financial decisions at older ages

Marco Angrisani and Jinkook Lee

The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, 2019, vol. 13, issue C, 86-101

Abstract: Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the association between cognition and financial outcomes among older American couples. We first investigate the relationship between couple members’ cognitive ability and financial responsibility within the household. Our results suggest that differences in the level of cognitive ability play a major role in determining who is the household financial decision-maker, while changes in cognitive ability of both couple members over time only marginally modify such choice. Next, we study changes in financial wealth following pronounced declines in cognitive test scores of household members. We observe significant reductions in wealth among households whose financial decision-maker experiences such declines. Wealth reductions are less sizeable among those with pension/annuity income and receiving help with finances from their children.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212828X17300506

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:eee:joecag:v:13:y:2019:i:c:p:86-101

DOI: 10.1016/j.jeoa.2018.03.003

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of the Economics of Ageing is currently edited by D.E. Bloom, A. Sousa-Poza and U. Sunde

More articles in The Journal of the Economics of Ageing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().