Preliminary–please do not cite without permission In the US, women tend to have lower levels of financial literacy than men. This is consistent with a household division of labor in which men manage finances. However, women also tend to outlive their husbands, so they will eventually need to take over this task. Using a new survey of older couples, I find that women acquire additional financial literacy as they approach widowhood. At an estimated increase of 0.04 standard deviations per year approaching widowhood, 80 % of women in my sample would catch up with their husbands prior to the expected onset of widowhood. I also demonstrate that these findings are due to actual increases by women and are not merely an artifact of cognitive decline among older men. These results are consistent with a model in which the household division of labor breaks down when a spouse dies. The model shows that women have an incentive both to delay acquiring financial knowledge and also to begin learning before widowhood. This paper represents the first empirical examination of the financial literacy of both membersofcouplesandprovidesalife-cycleinterpretationofthegendergapinfinancial literacy. This paper employs data that is generously supported by NIA grant P01 AG026571. Many thanks to

Consumers’choices depend on preferences over outcomes and beliefs about how their choices map into these outcomes. While economic models typically assume some form of rational expectations or "perfect beliefs, ” in reality consumers are often ill-informed or confused. In this paper, I elicit beliefs over the …nancial bene…ts and costs of higher or lower fuel economy using the Vehicle Ownership and Alternatives Survey, a new nationally-representative study of vehicle owners designed speci…cally for this project. Results show that beliefs are both highly noisy, consistent with imperfect information and bounded computational capacity, and systematically biased in a manner symptomatic of "MPG Illusion " (Larrick and Soll 2008). Conditional on these beliefs, I then estimate preferences in a discrete choice demand system for the US automobile market. In a counterfactual world with “perfect beliefs, ” consumers would demand fewer vehicles at the extremes of the fuel economy distribution and welfare would increase by about $0.8 billion per year, about $3.60 per potential vehicle consumer.

In this paper, I add evidence to an underdeveloped literature on how the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system can create incentives for workers to become unemployed. Speci cally, UI may discourage workers who feel vulnerable to job loss from looking for other jobs while employed in order to experience a job-to-job transition instead of a job-to-unemployment transition (i.e. preemptive on-the-job search). In this way, higher UI bene ts increase the in ow into unemployment and the overall unemployment in the economy in a di erent (and complementary) way to what has been extensively documented in the literature before. Only a few papers have looked at this mechanism previously: Light and Omori (2004) nd a very small e ect of UI bene ts in discouraging job-to-job transitions. Using a rich dataset with information on expectations of job loss and on-the-job search, I present evidence that the e ect of UI in discouraging preemptive on-the-job search among older Americans who feel at risk of displacement is actually substantial. However, the e ect of more generous UI on experiencing a posterior job separation and a non-working spell is much smaller, which may be explained because on-the-job search e ort does not necessarily lead to success in nding suitable o ers.

We consider the possibility that respondents to the Survey of Professional Forecasters round their probability forecasts of the event that real output will decline in the future. We make various assumptions about how forecasters round their forecasts, including that individuals have constant patterns of responses across forecasts. Our primary interests are the impact of rounding on assessments of the internal consistency of the probability forecasts of a decline in real output and the histograms for annual real output growth, and on the relationship between the probability forecasts and the point forecasts of quarterly output growth.