Susann Rohwedder is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation and associate director of the RAND Center for the Study of Aging. Her research focuses on the economics of aging in the areas of household consumption and saving behavior, retirement, long-term care, expectation formation, and subjective well-being.
Rohwedder has written on the impact of public pensions on household saving; the adequacy of retirement resources of U.S. households near retirement; the effect of retirement on cognitive ability; spending and saving patterns among the older population; the lifetime risk of nursing home entry and associated out-of-pocket expenditures; and various topics involving individuals’ expectations about future outcomes. Other papers deal with data quality and survey methods. Rohwedder has extensive experience in survey design and data collection: she is jointly responsible for the design of the HRS Consumption and Activities Mail Survey, led the design and collection of over 60 waves for the Financial Crisis Surveys fielded on the RAND American Life Panel and plays a leading role in the design and operations of the monthly data collections in the ongoing Singapore Life Panel.
Rohwedder is a research fellow of NETSPAR (Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging, and Retirement) in the Netherlands, serves on the Survey Committee of the German Socio-Economic Panel and is associate editor of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing. She holds master's degrees from the University of Warwick and the Sorbonne in Paris and a Ph.D. in economics from University College London.
Selected Publications
Jim Been, Susann Rohwedder and Michael D. Hurd, "Does Home Production Replace Consumption Spending? Evidence from Shocks in Housing Wealth in the Great Recession," Review of Economics and Statistics, 2018
Michael D. Hurd, Pierr-Carl Michaud and Susann Rohwedder, "Distribution of lifetime nursing home use and of out‐of‐pocket spending," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(37), 2017
Adeline Delavande and Susann Rohwedder, "Changes in spending and labor supply in response to a Social Security benefit cut: Evidence from stated choice data," Journal of the Economics of Ageing, 10, 2017
Hurd, Michael D. and Susann Rohwedder, "Heterogeneity in Spending Change at Retirement," Journal of the Economics of Ageing, 1, 2013
Delavande, Adeline and Susann Rohwedder, "Differential Survival in Europe and the United States: Estimates Based on Subjective Probabilities of Survival," Demography, 48(4), 2011
Rohwedder, Susann and Robert J. Willis, "Mental Retirement," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 24(1), 2010
Delavande, Adeline and Susann Rohwedder, "Eliciting Subjective Probabilities in Internet Surveys," Public Opinion Quarterly, 72(5), 2008
Attanasio, Orazio P. and Susann Rohwedder, "Pension Wealth and Household Saving: Evidence from Pension Reforms in the United Kingdom," American Economic Review, 93(5), 2003
