Author: Susan Barnes

Announcements, Uncategorized,

The next Retirement and Disability Research Consortium Meeting will be held August 7-9, 2024 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This free and public event showcases the latest in retirement and disability research from the nation’s top scholars. Agendas...

Announcements, Uncategorized,

MRDRC’s quarterly newsletter covers FY24 projects, plans for FY25, researcher news, and more. The PDF is available online. Subscribe to our mailing list for the email version.

Financial well-being>poverty, Social Security,

Sabelhaus & Henriques Volz estimate detailed life-cycle earnings profiles for Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) respondents & include Social Security wealth (SSW). Paper: https://bit.ly/MRDRCwp416  

Uncategorized,

Lopez Garcia, Maestas & Mullen examine changing job demands, the economy’s distribution of jobs, and indivdiuals’ job abilities using a novel @RAND_ALP survey. Paper here: https://bit.ly/MRDRCwp415

Disability, Disability insurance, Labor force participation, News, O*NET, Occupational Requirements Survey, Second career,

Anu: “I ran a 5k in 37 minutes.” Prasad: “I ate nine muffins as a post-race snack.” Anu and Prasad may be talking about the same 5k race. Or not. It’s hard to tell because they don’t share the same way of talking about racing. This makes it hard to compare their...

Health and Retirement Study, Health>Mortality trends, News,

While life expectancy is increasing overall, it hasn’t gone up evenly across all wealth groups: Richer people are living longer, but generally poorer people are not.[1] As income inequality grows, it is possible that mortality gaps will widen as well. This has...

Uncategorized,

Journal publications JAMA Internal Medicine published Lauren Nicholas, Ken Langa, Julie Bynum, and Joanne Hsu’s article, “Financial Presentation of Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias,” online in November. The work is based on Nicholas and Hsu’s 2018 MRRC project,...

Disability, Health and Retirement Study,

In its final workshop of the year, the MRDRC presented “Disability Research with the Health and Retirement Study [HRS]” on September 24, 2020. This was a Zoom event with about 50 participants. An online format removes, of course, the burdens of travel, so we were able...

Health>Mortality trends, Interest Rates, Labor force participation, News, pensions, Retirement, retirement savings>IRA withdrawals, Totalization,

MRDRC published eight working papers in 2019 on topics such as totalization agreements, global interest rate trends, and retirement inequality. Informing projections Interest Rate Trends in a Global Context Dmitriy Stolyarov and Linda Tesar WP 2019-402; UM19-05 Two...

News, OASDI trust funds, Social Security,

Every year the Social Security Administration’s Board of Trustees and the Office of the Chief Actuary (OCACT) produce a report on the health of the Old Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance (OASDI) trust funds. OCACT’s projections rest on assumptions on...

News, Social Security,

John Laitner The Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 80, No. 1 (February 2020), was devoted to review articles on activities over the fiscal years 2008 to 2017 of the three retirement and two disability research centers sponsored by the Social Security Administration: The...

Older workers, Retirement, Second career, Unretirement,

In 2015, Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen, David Powell, Jeffrey Wenger, and Till von Wachtner fielded two surveys. One asked respondents about their working conditions; the second asked about their preferences for certain job characteristics. The nine working...

Financial well-being, Health and Retirement Study, retirement savings>IRA withdrawals,

Tax-advantaged savings plans—such as IRAs, Keogh, 401ks—have a significant tax cost. Understanding their roles and effectiveness in retirement funding is crucial to assessing whether their benefits outweigh their price. Until fairly recently, measuring these accounts’...

Financial well-being, Health and Retirement Study, retirement savings>IRA withdrawals,

If Michael Hurd, Erik Meijer, Philip Pantoja, and Susann Rohwedder’s “Addition to the RAND HRS Longitudinal Files: IRA Withdrawals in the HRS, 2000-2014” were a home improvement project, the researchers would have put up spacious bookshelves in the Health and...

Labor Supply, Older workers,

“This [project] is prompted by a question I’ve been asked by many reporters, which is ‘With larger, older cohorts and relatively scarce younger workers, will employers shift to employing more older workers for one reason or another?’” investigator David Neumark said,...

Uncategorized,

Many proposed reforms might have varying affects on retirees. In the 1940s, if a man lived to age 65, the full retirement age (FRA), he would, on average, live another 12.7 years in retirement, while a woman would live another 14.7 years.[1] A man reaching today’s...

Uncategorized,

Sometimes researchers create structural economic models to help understand the Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Disability Insurance (DI) trust funds’ solvency issues and to test possible solutions. Taking information (data) from real life, they build a...

Uncategorized,

How to fix the solvency issues of the Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Disability Insurance (DI) trust funds, often referred to as the Social Security trust funds (OASDI), continues to concern policymakers and voters alike. As a pay-as-you-go system, payroll...

Uncategorized,

While research often focuses on the retirement bound individual or couple, few people live their lives with no outside influences. A parent’s desire to lighten a child’s burden could have a negative impact on the parent’s retirement security, and such altruism from...

Uncategorized,

In September, Michigan Retirement Research Center (MRRC) was awarded its fifth five-year cooperative agreement renewal from the Social Security Administration. MRRC Director and Principle Investigator John Laitner explained that as part of the grant proposal, MRRC...