Overview
David A. Wise was a Harvard Kennedy School economist and longtime director of the NBER Program on the Economics of Aging. He was the founding architect of the Health and Retirement Study and the principal editor of NBER's Economics of Aging book series spanning more than two decades. His research covered retirement behavior, health and wealth in old age, and the economics of Social Security.
Key Contributions
- Health and Retirement Study: Instrumental in designing and overseeing the HRS, the longitudinal survey of older Americans that underpins most modern empirical work on retirement and aging.
- NBER Economics of Aging series: Edited the multi-volume series that organizes and publishes HRS-based research, including work on household portfolios, health trajectories, and Social Security's financial effects.
- Poterba-Venti-Wise series: Co-author of the multi-paper analysis of post-retirement asset dynamics, the education-wealth gap, and DI participation. The 2010 paper (WP 15789) documents that assets grow for stable households but decline sharply at divorce; latent health quintile ratio widens from 1.7 to 2.2 over 1992–2006. The 2013a paper identifies the portfolio return gradient (6.6%–14.4%) as the dominant education-wealth pathway. The 2017 paper (WP 23307) decomposes education's effect on DI participation; health dominates for women (74.2%). See Post-Retirement Asset Drawdown and Education and DI Participation.
- Retirement incentives: Earlier work on employer pension incentives (option value models) and how plan design affects retirement timing.
- Heiss et al. (2007) — co-author; latent Ornstein-Uhlenbeck health model on all four HRS cohorts; selective mortality bias; work disability OR = 1.76 for mortality. See Morbidity-Mortality Distinction.
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