Peer-reviewed

Over the last several decades, there has been a well-documented trend away from defined benefit plans toward defined contribution plans, in which an employee's retirement income depends on contributions to the plan along with the investment earnings on those contributions. Current workers increasingly must decide how much to contribute to retirement plans and how to invest plan contributions.

The majority of research on the retirement decision has focused on the health and wealth aspects of retirement. Such research concludes that people in better health and those enjoying a higher socioeconomic status tend to work longer than their less healthy and less wealthy counterparts. While financial and health concerns are a major part of the retirement decision, there are other issues that may affect the decision to retire that are unrelated to an individual’s financial and health status.

Traditional economic theory posits that people make decisions by maximizing a utility function in which all of the relevant constraints and preferences are included and weighed appropriately. Behavioral economists and decision-making researchers, however, are interested in how people make decisions in the face of incomplete information, limited cognitive resources, and decision biases.

Increased policy and academic attention has been placed on promoting retirement savings early in the life course. This study investigates the extent to which retirement savings behavior among young persons, a population for which retirement savings is important but typically low, differs by marital status. We draw national survey data on young adult households (ages 22 – 35; N = 3,894) from the U.S. Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Results reveal considerable differences by marital status.

This study used the 1992–2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to investigate changes in risk tolerance levels over time in response to stock market returns. Findings indicate that risk tolerance tends to increase when market returns increase and decrease when market returns decrease. Individuals who change their risk tolerance in this manner are likely to invest in stocks when prices are high and sell when prices are low. Researchers, employers, financial educators and practitioners should help investors overcome the bias of overweighting recent news of market performance.

Research concerning the financial well-being of Chinese American households is extremely limited. This article examines factors that affect the probability that Chinese American households will hold debt. Analysis of data from a survey of Chinese Americans in five Midwestern states in the U.S. indicated that 80.5% of the sample households held some type of debt. Factors associated with the probability that a Chinese American household would be a debtor included age, presence of children under 18, health, annual income, and amount of financial and non-financial assets.

The importance of investment portfolio allocation has become more apparent since the onset of the late 2000s Great Recession. Individual willingness to take financial risks affects portfolio decisions and investment returns among other factors. Previous research found that people of different ages have dissimilar levels of risk tolerance but the effects of generation, period, and aging were confounded. Using the 1998–2007 Survey of Consumer Finances cross-sectional datasets, this study uses an analytical method to separate such effects on financial risk tolerance.

Individual savings are critical for retirement as government and employer-based provisions fade or become less secure. Rural communities are vulnerable given their higher proportion of elderly and more who rely on Social Security. Using a telephone survey of working-age residents in Michigan's rural Upper Peninsula, this research investigates factors associated with participation in tax-advantaged retirement plans that have largely replaced defined-benefit pension plans for earmarked retirement savings.

This journal article examines how the surge in home values between 2000 and 2006 and the drop in prices since then are related to the demand for reverse mortgage loans in the United States. It also investigates the relationship between recent trends in reverse mortgages and borrower characteristisc such as age, gender and state/region of residence of the eligible homeowner(s). The results of the study provide insight into how consumer education, the Federal Goverment, the mortgage industry and financial planners can better educate the population about this type of financing.

Abstract: The main factors underlying the rise in mortgage defaults appear to be declines in house prices and deteriorated underwriting standards, in particular an increase in loan-to-value ratios and in the share of mortgages with little or no documentation of income.