Itzik received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in May 2015. After receiving his Ph.D., Itzik spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Policy Research at the NBER.
Itzik’s dissertation, titled “Essays on Retirement, Savings, and Health”, addresses important questions on the economics of aging. The first chapter of his dissertation, jointly written with Torben Heien Nielsen, studies how households respond to severe health shocks and the insurance role of spousal labor supply. The second chapter, jointly written with Jessica Laird and Torben Heien Nielsen, empirically studies how firms, which play an increasingly significant role in retirement savings, set their contributions to employees’ savings accounts, and analyzes whether employer contributions reflect employees’ savings preferences. Lastly, the third chapter, jointly written with David Laibson, theoretically studies savings in the presence of non-optimizing agents and the effect of a benevolent planner on overall retirement savings.