2013
Does Household Debt Influence the Labor Supply and Benefit Claiming Decisions of Older Americans?
More than half of all Social Security beneficiaries claim their benefits before reaching full retirement age, which has important implications for individual retirement income security and for the Social Security program itself. Whereas previous studies have analyzed the determinants of…
Earnings Adjustment Frictions: Evidence from the Social Security Earnings Test
Recent literature has suggested that individuals face frictions in adjusting their earnings in response to policy, such as the cost of gathering information about policy or of finding a job that pays their desired earnings level. Using a panel of…
Adding Employer Contributions to Health Insurance to Social Security’s Earnings and Tax Base
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Differential Mortality and Retirement Benefits in the Health and Retirement Study
The objective of this study is to investigate the magnitude of the increase in differential mortality and its impact on the progressivity of the retirement system. Several studies have incorporated differential mortality in constructed measures of lifetime contributions and benefits;…
Point of No Return: How Does the Duration of a Jobless Spell Affect Retirement Timing?
This project uses the Survey of Income and Program Participation to examine the decision to retire after job separation among the increasing number of older individuals who lose a job between 55 and 70, and how this decision varies by…
Did Age Discrimination Protections Help Older Workers Weather the Great Recession?
We examine whether stronger age discrimination laws at the state level moderated the impact of the Great Recession on older workers. We use a difference-in-difference-in-differences strategy to compare older workers in states with stronger and weaker laws, to their prime-age…
Recessions, Older Workers, and Longevity: How Long Are Recessions Good For Your Health?
Although past research has found that recessions reduce contemporaneous mortality, workers nearing retirement age may experience reduced longevity attributable to lengthy unemployment spells and lost health insurance at a particularly vulnerable time. To test this hypothesis, we generate age-specific cohort…
Debt and Debt Management among Older Adults
Of particular interest in the present economic environment is whether access to credit is changing peoples’ indebtedness over time, particularly as they approach retirement. This project analyzes older individuals’ debt, debt management practices, and financial fragility using data from the…
What Makes Annuitization More Appealing?
We conduct and analyze two large surveys of hypothetical annuitization choices. We find that allowing individuals to annuitize a fraction of their wealth increases annuitization relative to a situation where annuitization is an “all or nothing” decision. Very few respondents…
Health and Wealth In a Lifecycle Model
We develop a model of health investments and consumption over the life cycle where health affects longevity, provides ow utility, and health and consumption can be complements or substitutes. We solve each households dynamic optimization problem using data from the…