Moscow city households reported in Round 6 of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Study (RLMS).<sup>20</sup> The value of the units was estimated using two self-reported measures. Respondents who purchased their apartments were asked to say how much they paid. Respondents who had not purchased were also asked if they knew the value of apartments similar to theirs which had been recently sold, and if they could provide a dollar figure. The residents who responded to these two questions provided a sample of 381 observations which was used to estimate a model of hedonic house price characteristics. Before estimating the model, high and low outliers were assigned an appropriate per square meter price. The model imputes the price per square meter, adjusted for various qualitative characteristics which when multiplied by the unit's total space, yields an approximation of the unit value of constant quality. All independent variables included in the final model were significant at the .10 level or higher.

Analysis of the data indicates that a substantial share of pensioner households have incomes that hover just above the poverty line. Just under one-quarter of all elderly households and over one-third of single (mainly female-headed) elderly households are near poor. If we were to extrapolate the figures presented in Table 1 to Moscow, we would find that the number of lower income elderly households living alone or in couples is about 164,000, slightly more than 5 percent of all of the households. This group comprises what we term the "social safety net eligible" component of the market for reverse mortgages and other financial products. These are the pensioners who have the legal right to sell their apartments. If we extend eligibility to include all households containing an elderly person with total income not exceeding 150 percent of the 20 The RLMS was carried out in October, just one month prior to the MLHS. We increased the poverty line by 5 percent to account for inflation and other adjustments. The 5 percent figure reflects the increase between the October and November official poverty lines reported by the State Committee on Statistics (Goskomstat). 1996. _Sotsial 'no-Ekonomicheskoe Polozhenie Rossii, 1995 g.,_ p. 487. This poverty line was developed by researchers at the University of North Carolina in collaboration with the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Nutrition, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, and Paragon Research International. It is based on the cost of food baskets designed to meet the nutritional needs of men, women, and children of varying ages. Thus, the poverty line consists of a set of thresholds for five population groups: men and women in the post-work ages (ages 60+ and 55+, respectively), working-aged men, working-aged women, and children under 7 years of age, and children aged 8 to 18. The poverty line for elderly persons in 1995 is: 191,257 rubles. The thresholds are adjusted with equivalence scales ranging between .68 to I according to the size of the household. For detailed information on the construction of the RLMS poverty line, see: Popkin et. al. (1996). The subsistence minima reported in the State Comrnittee of Statistic publications have been criticized for being too high and thus, unrealistic. See for example, Poduzov and Kukushkin (1999). The subsistence minimum for the elderly living in Moscow in November.1995 is 160 percent higher than the RLMS poverty line. We also experimented with other poverty lines, including the official poverty line for Moscow city (known as the subsistence minimum _(prozhitel 'ni minimum))._ The subsistence minima for the five population groups were considerably higher than the poverty thresholds used in the RLMS and identified 48 percent of pensioners to be poor compared with other official estimates of 18 and 19 percent. However, when the RLMS poverty thresholds were applied, the share of the sample deemed poor fell.to 8.2 percent, about 10 percentage points less than the official estimates. When the two samples of elderly and non-elderly households are compared, the figures are very similar: 9.5 percent of Moscow households are poor in the RLMS, compared to 11 percent in the MLHS. We thus employ a restrictive poverty definition in which only a smnall fraction of the elderly population is identified as being poor.

21 This model was developed by Claire Romanik at the Urban Institute. It is described more fully Romanik and Struyk (1996).

9