Social Security Claiming: Trends and Business Cycle Effects

Probabilistic Thinking and Social Security Claiming

This study analyzes the extent to which an individual’s survival expectations influence his or her decision to claim social security benefits at an early age. We find that subjective survival probabilities capture meaningful behavioral responses to incentives for early Social Security claiming when they are purged of measurement error using risk factors as instruments. Among people who are stil...

Probabilistic Thinking and Early Social Security Claiming

How Family Status and Social Security Claiming Options Shape Optimal Life Cycle Portfolios.

We show how optimal household decisions regarding work, retirement, saving, portfolio allocations, and life insurance are shaped by the complex financial options embedded in U.S. Social Security rules and uncertain family transitions. Our life cycle model predicts sharp consumption drops on retirement, an age-62 peak in claiming rates, and earlier claiming by wives versus husbands and single wo...

Framing and Claiming: How Information-Framing Affects Expected Social Security Claiming Behavior.

This paper provides evidence that Social Security benefit claiming decisions are strongly affected by framing and are thus inconsistent with expected utility theory. Using a randomized experiment that controls for both observable and unobservable differences across individuals, we find that the use of a "breakeven analysis" encourages early claiming. Respondents are more likely to delay when la...

Behavioral Effects of Social Security Policies on Benefit Claiming, Retirement and Saving

The central purpose of this paper is to formulate and estimate a retirement model that also includes claiming of Social Security benefits as an outcome, and to use the model to inquire about the effects of various proposals to change the Social Security system. The forerunner to this work is a retirement model previously built to capture the spike in retirement at the Social Security early enti...