The near-retirement households among all working-age groups in the United States experienced larger drops in consumption and greater increases in labor force participation during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Also, the retirement probability for near-retirement homeowners (but not for renters) decreases more in those areas where housing prices also decline more. This paper argues that the wealth effect of housing prices on retirement can account for those issues. It creates an incomplete-market life-cycle partial-equilibrium model with risky housing assets and endogenous retirement and verifies that the joint response of retirement and non-durable consumption implied by the structural model is consistent with the empirical findings using data from the Health and Retirement Study 1992-2012. It then shows that, after an unexpected 28 percent housing price decline, near-retirement homeowners ages 55-64 will reduce their non-durable consumption by 4.6 percent and increase their labor force participation by 1 percentage point immediately and delay their retirement by 2.8 months in the long run. The model also quantifies endogenous retirement as self-insurance for elderly homeowners against housing price risk. (Copyright: Elsevier)

This paper studies an economy inhabited by overlapping generations of households and investors, with the only difference between the two being that households derive utility from housing services, whereas investors do not. Tight collateral constraint limits the borrowing capacity of households and drives the equilibrium interest rate level down to the housing price growth rate, which makes housing attractive as a store of value for investors. A housing bubble arises in an equilibrium in which investors hold houses for resale purposes only and without the expectation of receiving a dividend either in terms of utility or in terms of rent. Pension reform that reduces the contribution rate may increase the supply of credit and create the housing bubble. Empirical findings from China are consistent with theoretical predictions. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

The paper estimates the household labor earning process using the March Current Population Survey 1968–2011. GMM estimates confirm that the results in Storesletten et al. (2004) still hold in a much larger data set over a longer period. The persistent idiosyncratic risk is strongly countercyclical, with an annual auto-correlation equal to .973 and an standard deviation that increases by 72.5% (from .090 to .156) as the macroeconomy moves from peak to trough.