SeaTE: Subjective ex ante Treatment Effect of Health on Retirement

This research uses data from the Vanguard Research Initiative (VRI) that was developed by a research team under a program project grant from the National Institute on Aging P01-AG026571. The Vanguard Group Inc. supported the data collection of the VRI. Vanguard’s Client Insight Group and IPSOS SA were responsible for implementing the VRI survey and provided substantial input into its design. John Ameriks, Andrew Caplin, and Matthew D. Shapiro are co-principal investigator of the VRI. The design of the VRI benefited from the collaboration and assistance of Joseph Briggs, Wandi Bruine de Bruin, Alycia Chin, Mi Luo, Minjoon Lee, Brooke Helppie McFall, Ann Rodgers, and Christopher Tonetti as part of the program project, from Annette Bonner (Vanguard), and Wendy O’Connell (IPSOS SA). This project uses Survey 4 of the VRI that was designed by Ameriks, Briggs, Caplin, Lee, Shapiro, and Tonetti. The conditional probability battery used in this paper, which was included in VRI Survey 4 and a module of the HRS 2016, was designed in collaboration with Michael Hurd, Peter Hudomiet, Gabor Kezdi, Susann Rohwedder, and Robert Willis. For documentation of the VRI, including a dynamic link to the survey instrument, see http://ebp-projects.isr.umich.edu/VRI/. For documentation of the HRS, see HRS 2016 experimental module 5 at https://hrs.isr.umich.edu/documentation/questionnaires. This research was supported by a grant from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA), funded as part of the Retirement Research Consortium (RRC). The findings and conclusions expressed are solely those of the author(s) and do not represent the views of SSA. We thank Feiya Shao, Ann Rodgers, and Dawn Zinsser for their assistance. We are grateful to Gábor Kézdi, Wilbert van der Klaauw, Eric French, and participants at seminars and conferences for very helpful comments and discussion. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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