Consumption and Saving after Retirement / Bent Jesper Christensen, Malene Kallestrup-Lamb, John Kennan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Christensen, Bent Jesper.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kallestrup-Lamb, Malene.

Kennan, John.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w29826.

NBER working paper series no. w29826

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.

Summary:

The paper analyzes consumption decisions of retired workers, using Danish register data. A major puzzle, which motivates much of the analysis below, is that wealth actually increases for a large fraction of the people in our data. One would expect that wealth accumulated before retirement would be used to augment consumption in later life, with the implication that wealth should decline over time. The risk of large out-of-pocket medical expenditures is negligible in Denmark, so although explanations associated with such expenditures might explain similar patterns in U.S. data, these explanations are not plausible for Denmark (and therefore also questionable for the U.S.). Our analysis instead attempts to explain wealth paths using a model that emphasizes fluctuations in the marginal utility of consumption. The results show that a latent state variable extension of the standard life-cycle consumption model is quite successful in explaining the curious observed wealth patterns after retirement for singles.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2022.