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

The research reported herein was performed pursuant to a grant from the U.S. Social Security Administration to the Michigan Retirement Research Center as part of the Retirement Research Consortium. Additional research support was provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the German Investment and Asset Management Association (BVI), the Pension Research Council/Boettner center at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Metzler Exchange Professor program, and the Eunice Shriver Kennedy National Institute of Child Health and Development Population Research Infrastructure Program R24 HD-044964-10 at the University of Pennsylvania. The authors thank David Love, Sita Slavov, Karen Smith, and John Shoven for generously sharing data and computer code; Yong Yu for excellent programming assistance; and James Anderson for research assistance. Opinions and errors are solely those of the authors and not of the institutions with whom the authors are affiliated. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.