Download PDF - Ivie

savings, since retirement and social security income for the elderly is the result of household
savings throughout the life cycle (Lee, 2001; Lillard and Weiss, 1997), while the ratio of mortgage
payments to house value reflects the couple’s capacity and willingness to save rather than consume
(Wolff, 1998; Deaton and Paxson, 1994; Lin, et al., 2000; Hurst, et al., 1998).
The regressors are the age and the educational level, the latter defined as the number of
completed years of schooling, of each partner (spouse); the number of household members or of
each partner’s own children living in the household; and a dummy variable for the length of time
that the household has occupied the current residence (5 years or less), as a proxy for the duration of
the relationship. Unfortunately, the Census does not record the total number of either the head or
the partner's children but only the number of those who are currently members of the household.
This is particularly regrettable in regard to our elderly-couples sample, in which the discrepancy
between the actual total number of children and the total recorded by the Census would be
particularly large. 7 . We account for economic conditions controlling for the total individual
incomes of both heads and partners (spouses) in 1990, creating an average individual income in
1990 by state, race, sexual orientation, cohabitation status, age (5-year brackets) and education (4
groups, high-school dropouts, high school graduates, some college, college and college plus), which
we merge by these characteristics to our sample in year 2000. As our analysis concerns current
retirement income and the ratio of mortgage to house value by different types of households, we
want to control for “lagged” income as a measure of the wealth and income that an individual in a
given reference group is expected to have, on average.
Although an individual’s health status is not recorded in the US Census, his or her disability
status along several dimension of impairment (ambulatory, cognitive, and/or vision impairments,
and independent living and work disabilities) is, and so we construct and control for the
corresponding dummy variables in our estimation of the elderly sample. State dummy variables are
7 A record of the total number of children borne by a woman is available in the Census, but only for women and only
until 1990.
16