title: Health, Education, and the Post-Retirement Evolution of Household Assets.
abstract: We explore the relationship between education and the evolution of wealth after retirement. Asset growth following retirement depends in part on health capital and financial capital accumulated prior to retirement, which in turn are strongly related to educational attainment. These "initial conditions" at retirement can have a lingering effect on subsequent asset evolution. We aim to disentangle the effects of education that operate through health and financial pathways (such as Social Security benefits and the general level of health)priorto retirement from the effects of education that impinge directly on asset evolutionafterretirement. We also consider the additional effects of education that are not captured through these pathways. We find a substantial effect of education on asset growth through each of the pathways as well as a substantial additional effect not captured by the identified pathways.
authors.affiliation: MIT and NBER.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Poterba
authors.affiliation: Dartmouth and NBER.
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Venti
authors.affiliation: Harvard and NBER.
authors.forename: David A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Wise