A Dynamic Analysis of Household Dissolution and Living Arrangement Transitions by Elderly Americans

This paper exploits the new non-response files of the Panel Study of income Dynamics in order to study living arrangement transitions of elderly Americans. The focus of the paper is an estimate of the probability of household dissolution, i.e., the probabilities of transitions from living independently to living with adult children or other related or unrelated persons and the probability of becoming institutionalized, and an investigation of the factors causing such transitions. Our main result is an astounding stability of living arrangements even after incisive life-events such as death of a spouse, onset of a disability, or in the years immediately preceding death, in particular the large proportion of elderly who stay living independently until their deaths. Almost two thirds of all elderly are living independently in the year of their deaths. 14.4 percent share at least once housing with relatives or friends, 3.1 percent experience a stay in an institution. Old age, being male or of low income significantly increases the risk of institutionalization. Elderly with a large family and nonwhite elderly are the groups most likely to share housing. All this might be expected. An important new finding, however, is the time trend of these probabilities. Holding all other factors constant, the risk of institutionalization increased substantially between 1968 and 1984 while the likelihood of being "taken in" by relatives or friends markedly decreased.

Household Saving in Germany: Results of the first SAVE study

Germany is an interesting country to study saving among older households since nearly everyone - whether in the middle income bracket or richer - saves substantial amounts in old age. Only households in the lowest quarter of the income distribution spend more between the ages of 60 and 75 than they save. Our paper exploits newly collected data, the first wave of the so-called SAVE panel, specifically collected to understand economic, psychological and sociological determinants of saving. Overall, we find extraordinarily stable savings patterns. More than 40% of German households save regularly a fixed amount. About 25% of German households plan their savings and have a clearly defined savings target in mind. Most of German household saving is in the form of contractual saving, such as saving plans, whole life insurance and building society contracts. This makes the flow of saving rather unresponsive to economic fluctuations, such as income shocks. Most households prefer to cut consumption if ends do not meet. In particular the elderly do not like to use credit cards, and they eschew debt. We suspect large cohort differences and will study them once further waves of the SAVE panel will become available.

Pension Reform in Germany: The Impact on Retirement Decisions

The financing problems beleaguering the public pension system have again shifted the spotlight onto the retirement age. This paper examines the impact of various reform options on the actual retirement choices of older workers. The paper focuses in particular on the long-term implications of the changes implemented in pension legislation since 1992 and the reform options discussed by the German Social Security Reform Commission installed in 2002, the so called R?rup Commission'. Our simulations show that the early-retirement pension adjustment factors introduced by the 1992 pension reform will, in the long term, raise the average effective age of retirement for men by somewhat less than two years. The across-the-board two-year increase in all the relevant age limits proposed by the R?rup Commission' would raise the effective average age of retirement of men by about eight months. If the actuarial adjustment factor is increased from 3.6% to 6% per year, the effective average retirement age rises by almost two years. The effects are considerably weaker for women.

Imperial sainthood? Justinian’s body between the Terrestrial and Heavenly spheres

In a memorable episode from his panegyric buildings, Procopius of Caesarea describes how a chest with martyr relics found in the foundations of Hagia Eirene is opened on the knees of the sick Emperor Justinian: The ruler himself experiences immediate healing, and as proof of the divine power a holy oil flows out of the vessel, moistening the emperor's purple robe and turning it into a remedy for all who will be hopelessly sick in the future (Procop. aed. I 7,7-11). The theme that Procopius uses here has its roots in hagiographic wonder episodes. At the same time, the passage is only one out of several contemporary testimonies that approach Justinian's bodily appearance and habitus to that of an ascetic taking part in wondrous deeds-i.e., a holy man. The body of the ruler in his purple ornate, embodying, in the early Byzantine empire, the monarchy itself, here seems to transcend the limits between the terrestrial and the heavenly sphere. The paper strives to investigate this phenomenon in the context of contemporary Christian discourse and to investigate in how far the orientation towards models of holiness, visible here in an exemplary manner, shaped the evolvement of the Byzantine monarchy

Healthy, Wealthy, and Knowing Where to Live: Predicted Trajectories of Health, Wealth and Living Arrangements Among the Oldest Old

Health, wealth and where one lives are important, if not the three most important material living conditions. There are many mechanisms that suggest that living arrangements and well-being derived from health and economic status are closely related. This paper investigates the joint evolution of the three conditions, using a microeconometric approach similar to what is known as vector autoregressions' (VAR) in the macroeconomics literature.

Subsisting or Succumbing? Falling Wages in the Era of Plague

This article reexamines wages in Egypt using new evidence not analyzed in my previous study of the late Mamluk economy (Borsch, The Black Death in Egypt and England, 2005). The results show that wages for unskilled labor fell precipitously from the 1300s to the 1400s and stayed at a very low level thereafter

Plague Depopulation and Irrigation Decay in Medieval Egypt

Starting with the Black Death, and continuing over the century and a half that followed, plague depopulation brought about the ruin of Egypt’s irrigation system, the motor of its economy. For many generations, the Egyptians who survived the plague therefore faced a tragic new reality: a transformed landscape and way of life significantly worsened by plague, a situation very different from that of plague survivors in Europe. This article looks at the ways in which this transformation took place. It measures the scale and scope of rural depopulation and explains why it had such a significant impact on the agricultural infrastructure and economy