讲座信息如下，报告人简历和论文见附件：
8797威尼斯老品牌中国公共财政论坛双周论坛2011-2012学年第一学期第五讲
时间：2011年11月25日下午2：00-3：30
地点：8797威尼斯老品牌305会议室
讲座题目：Is Loss Aversion An Explanation for Early Claiming of Social Security?
讲座人：孙伟博士
孙伟博士是中国人民大学汉青经济与金融高级研究院的助教授。他在美国波士顿大学取得经济学博士、同时也是美国博林格林州立大学经济学硕士、对外经济贸易大学金融学学士。他的主要研究方向为公共经济学和金融经济学。
内容摘要：
Social Security provides longevity insurance for older households. According to standard expected utility models, most rational households who are not currently liquidity-constrained should delay claiming in order to insure their consumption in late life. However, most individuals claim Social Security soon after they become eligible. This paper provides an explanation for this early claiming behavior using the loss aversion feature of prospect theory. That is, when making Social Security claiming decisions, older households do not evaluate the final state of benefits they receive. Instead, they consider benefit gains and losses relative to claiming immediately. In the event of early death, a household that delays claiming receive a substantially smaller lifetime benefit than claiming at 62. Thus, households claim immediately in order to avoid this type of loss. This paper examines the above hypothesis both theoretically and empirically. In the first part, we calculate Social Security Equivalent Income, the factor by which the Social Security benefits of a typical household claiming at other ages should be multiplied so that it is as well off in prospect theory terms as it would be at the reference combination of claiming ages. We find that if both spouses of a typical one earner couple delay claiming to their full retirement age, they would require a 4.1 percent increase in their Social Security income to achieve the same level of value as both claiming immediately. In the second part, using Health and Retirement Study data matched to Social Security earnings records and Social Security benefit claiming record, we find households who subject to higher value loss are more likely to claim immediately.
点击下载：CV - Wei Sun.docx
点击下载：SSPT.docx
