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Previous research finds a systematic decrease in consumption at retirement, a finding that is inconsistent with the Life-Cycle/Permanent Income Hypothesis if retirement is an expected event. In this paper, we use workers' subjective beliefs about their retirement dates as an instrument for retirement. After demonstrating that subjective retirement expectations are strong predictors of subsequent retirement decisions, we still find a retirement consumption decline for workers who retire when expected. However, our estimates of this consumption fall are about a third less than those found when we instead rely on the instrumental variables strategy used in prior studies. Finally, we examine a number of hypotheses that have been put forward to explain the retirement consumption decline. We find little empirical support for these explanations in our data.
Previous research finds a systematic fall in consumption at retirement, even when these retirements are expected, which implies households do not behave as predicted by the lifecycle/ permanent income hypothesis. However, the worker's expected date of retirement is typically predicted using an instrument - age - that we show to be correlated with unexpected retirements and will therefore lead to biased estimates. In this paper, we use an alternative instrument for expected retirement: workers' own subjective beliefs of their expected retirement dates. We find that subjective retirement expectations provide strong predictive power for subsequent retirements above and beyond the impact of age on retirement probabilities. We still find, however, that consumption falls for workers who retire when expected although the estimated impact is 50 percent smaller when using retirement expectations as an instrument instead of age.
Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,0, University of Mannheim, course: Seminar in Bankbetriebslehre und Behavioral Finance , language: English, abstract: The literature on consumption behavior finds that households consistently reduce consumption at retirement. It documents a consumption dip of between seven and 17% on average. However, according to life cycle theory, households smooth marginal utility of consumption across time periods. The discrepancy between the predictions of theory and empirical findings is known as the retirement-consumption puzzle. A deeper knowledge on retirement saving behavior is of interest for at least three reasons. First, it facilitates the testing of theoretical models like the life cycle hypothesis. Thereby, it helps to understand if and by how far individuals plan their retirement in a rational manner. Second,... [...] The task of this paper is to assess both theory and empirical evidence of the retirement consumption puzzle. It, therefore, discusses the basic characteristics of standard life cycle theory in section 2. Section 3 examines the main determinants of the puzzle and perspectives from which the puzzle has been investigated. Section 4 concludes.
Using a panel sample of older Americans I investigate the drop in consumption at retirement, i.e. the so-called retirement-consumption puzzle, by taking into account that individuals may re-enter the labor force after being retired. In contrast with previous studies I look at how household consumption responds to the changes in both males' and females' labor market status. This paper has two important findings. Firstly, the unretirement decision is mainly determined by pre-retirement expectations of work and financial factors such as the amount of individuals' accumulated savings at the time of retirement and having an occupational pension plan. Secondly, in a model where retirement and unretirement are instrumented with individuals' retirement expectations, consumption does not respond to retirement or unretirement in line with the predictions of the life-cycle model. Overall, the findings of this paper suggest that individuals are able to smooth their consumption around retirement.
This paper uses a detailed panel of individual spending, income, account balances, and credit limits from a personal finance management software provider to investigate how expenditures, liquid savings, and consumer debt change around retirement. The longitudinal nature of our data allows us to estimate individual fixed-effects regressions and thereby control for all selection on time-invariant (un)observables. We provide new evidence on the retirement-consumption puzzle and on whether individuals save adequately for retirement. We find that, upon retirement, individuals reduce their spending in both work-related and leisure categories. However, we feel that it is difficult to tell conclusively whether expenses are work related or not, even with the best data. We thus look at household finances and find that individuals delever upon retirement by reducing consumer debt and increasing liquid savings. We argue that these findings are difficult to rationalize via, for example, work-related expenses. A rational agent would save before retirement because of the expected fall in income, and dissave after retirement, rather than the exact opposite.
Handbook of Economic Expectations discusses the state-of-the-art in the collection, study and use of expectations data in economics, including the modelling of expectations formation and updating, as well as open questions and directions for future research. The book spans a broad range of fields, approaches and applications using data on subjective expectations that allows us to make progress on fundamental questions around the formation and updating of expectations by economic agents and their information sets. The information included will help us study heterogeneity and potential biases in expectations and analyze impacts on behavior and decision-making under uncertainty. Combines information about the creation of economic expectations and their theories, applications and likely futures Provides a comprehensive summary of economics expectations literature Explores empirical and theoretical dimensions of expectations and their relevance to a wide array of subfields in economics
Previous research has repeatedly found a puzzling one-time drop in the mean and median of consumption at retirement, contrary to the predictions of the life-cycle hypothesis. However, very little is known as to whether these effects vary across the consumption distribution. This study expands upon the previous work by examining changes in the consumption distribution between the non-retired and the retired using quantile regression techniques on pseudo-cohorts from the cross-sectional data of the 1990-2007 Consumer Expenditure Survey. The results indicate that there are insignificant changes between these groups at the lower end of the consumption distribution, while there are significant decreases at the higher end of this distribution. In addition, these changes in the distribution are gradually larger in magnitude when moving from the lower end to the higher end, which is found using several different measures of consumption. Work-related expenditures are instead shown to decrease uniformly across the consumption distribution. This evidence reveals that there is a progressive distributional component to the retirement consumption puzzle.
While the life-cycle hypothesis predicts that consumption remains smooth during the transition from work into retirement, recent studies have shown that consumption declines at retirement. This empirical result has been referred to as the retirement consumption puzzle. Previous literature has most often relied on food expenditures to estimate the decline in consumption at retirement. We add to this literature by using broader definitions of consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), which is a survey designed to estimate total household expenditures. We conduct cohort analysis, using data on four cohorts over 20 years from 1984 to 2003. Our results using only food expenditures are on the lower end of the distribution of existing results. As we use broader measures of consumption, our results suggest that the retirement consumption conundrum decreases by more than half. Further, another contribution of this analysis is to widen the focus of the study of the well-being of the elderly. The retirement consumption puzzle does not tell the whole story on the well-being of the elderly. While we find that consumption-expenditures decrease by about 2.5 percent when individuals retire, expenditures continue to decline at about a rate of 1 percent per year after that.
The simple one-good model of life-cycle consumption requires "consumption smoothing." According to previous results based on partial spending and on synthetic panels, British and U.S. households apparently reduce consumption at retirement. The reduction cannot be explained by the simple one-good life-cycle model, so it has been referred to as the retirement-consumption puzzle. An interpretation is that at retirement individuals discover they have fewer economic resources than they had anticipated prior to retirement, and as a consequence reduce consumption. This interpretation challenges the life-cycle model where consumers are assumed to be forward-looking. Using panel data, we find that prior to retirement workers anticipated on average a decline of 13.3% in spending and after retirement they recollected a decline of 12.9%: widespread surprise is not the explanation for the retirement-consumption puzzle. Workers with substantial wealth both anticipated and recollected a decline. Therefore, for many workers the decline is not necessitated by the fall in income that accompanies retirement. Poor health is associated with above-average declines. At retirement time spent in activities that could substitute for market-purchased goods increases. Apparently a number of factors contribute to the decline in spending, which, for most of the population, can be accommodated in conventional models of economic behavior.